Career Conversation with

Specialist-track positioning: what to build, what to read, what the realistic 12-month trajectory looks like. For engineers pivoting into AI security, governance, or architecture.

I am an Independent Principal AI Architect based in the Netherlands, with 15+ years of experience across software engineering, cloud architecture, and AI. I currently lead architecture and R&D at PostNL's AI Centre of Excellence, where I authored the enterprise AI Reference Architecture adopted as the organisational standard for all AI initiatives. Before that, I was an Advisory AI Engineer at IBM, working across the NCEE market on WatsonX deployments and security product R&D for IBM QRadar EDR. I hold an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with Distinction from the University of Bath.

Moreover, I run TaoQ AI (taoq.ai), an independent AI security and EU AI Act governance practice. I maintain Ziran (github.com/taoq-ai/ziran), an open-source AI agent red-teaming framework. I contribute to NVIDIA Garak and Hugging Face Transformers.

WHAT I MENTOR ON

I work best with mentees who want to move into one of the following specialist tracks:

• AI architecture for production systems: designing and mantaining enterprise AI stacks across Generative AI, Agentic AI, MLOps, and edge deployment. What breaks in production and why.

• AI agent security and red-teaming: prompt injection, tool chain attacks, multi-phase trust exploitation, testing methodology. Hands-on with Ziran, Garak, and Promptfoo.

• EU AI Act compliance for engineers: classification under Article 6, conformity assessment, Annex IV technical file preparation. Regulation read as engineering, not as a compliance checkbox.

• Career transitions into AI specialist tracks: how engineers, security professionals, and governance people actually move into senior AI roles. Realistic timelines, portfolio building, positioning.