Leone Lage Perdigão

Path

My path started in software engineering in Brazil in 2010. Over fifteen years I moved through full-stack development, cloud architecture, and platform engineering, leading teams along the way — including at IBM, PostNL, Tikkie (ABN AMRO), and Randstad. The shift into AI came from a specific frustration: the gap between what AI can do in research and what it actually delivers in production was where the most interesting projects were getting stuck. I went back to university to earn an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Distinction) from the University of Bath, UK, while continuing to lead AI engineering teams in industry. That set up the work I do today.

TaoQ AI is the independent practice I founded — an AI practice spanning the full value chain, with sharper focus on security, governance, and evaluation. The clients are European technology companies; the work is concrete — threat modelling, agent red-teaming, conformity gap analysis, Annex IV technical documentation, evaluation frameworks — and so are the conversations. I work with engineering leaders on the questions that don't fit neatly on a slide: where their security posture is actually exposed, when to build and when to buy, what compliance looks like when you have to defend it in front of a regulator or an auditor. The engagements stay close enough to the work that I remain in the code with them.

In parallel, I serve as Lead AI Architect at PostNL's AI Centre of Excellence — the work I most enjoy: deep technical thinking, organisation-shaping decisions, and the cross-team craft that turns research into systems people actually depend on. I authored the PostNL AI Reference Architecture — the patterns the organisation uses to take generative and agentic AI from prototype into evaluated, governed, live deployment — and it has been adopted as the organisational standard. But authorship was the easy part. The day-to-day is hands-on: guiding three teams across the full AI value chain (Prototyping, Core Tech & R&D, and AI Adoption & Governance), shaping the systems that bring the architecture to life, sitting alongside the CTO and Principal Engineers on the technology choices that matter, and weaving cloud, edge, AI platforms, security, and integration into a coherent whole at the scale of a 30,000-person organisation. The MLOps/LLMOps standards are built to meet EU AI Act expectations; the goal throughout is the same — AI that is not only capable, but defensible.

Before the AI Centre of Excellence, I was Advisory AI Engineer at IBM, the technical authority for AI solutions across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. The role ran on two parallel tracks. One was enterprise AI: architecting end-to-end systems on WatsonX and fine-tuning foundation models for strategic clients across multiple industries. The other was security product R&D — leading the AI side of IBM QRadar EDR, designing the APIs and the MLOps lifecycle for ML-based threat detection. Alongside the client work I served as an IBM Blue Core Mentor and a recognised speaker across the region. Earlier still, as Lead Software Engineer in PostNL's Cloud Centre of Excellence, I architected the serverless-first AWS Cloud Platform that now serves 100+ teams across 1,000+ AWS accounts, and built a data-lakehouse cloud economics platform that drives cost optimisation and workload recommendations across the organisation.

The thread further back belongs in the story too. Cloud-native API engineering at Tikkie (ABN AMRO); before that, building the serverless AWS platform at Randstad Holding that integrates its 40+ operating companies globally; before that, as Solutions Architect at Banco Inter, designing and building services for the Investments squad at Brazil's second-largest digital bank; before that, fintech, logistics, and embedded IoT engineering work in Brazil. Through all of it, the same conviction about engineering leadership: hire well, ship reliably, and keep the architecture honest as it scales.

Mentorship is part of how I stay sharp. I'm an IBM Blue Core Mentor and an active MentorCruise tech mentor (5.0 rating), coaching engineers, consultants, and emerging architects on AI, cloud, and software engineering. The academic foundation behind the practice: the MSc from the University of Bath (2022–2025, focused on Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Robotics & Machine Vision). Earlier, I studied Computer Engineering at CEFET-MG, Brazil for three years before transitioning to a BSc Information Systems at Universidade FUMEC, Brazil.

Open Source & Research

Alongside consulting work, I dedicate time to open-source development and applied research in AI security and cryptography. I created Ziran, an open-source AI agent security testing framework (Apache-2.0) that performs tool chain vulnerability analysis, multi-phase exploit campaigns, and CI/CD security gating. I also contribute to NVIDIA's Garak (LLM vulnerability scanner) and Hugging Face's Transformers library, and I am building open-source tooling for post-quantum cryptography security — including quantum threat modelling, cryptographic agility tracking, and CI/CD compliance scanning for quantum-vulnerable algorithms. This hands-on involvement keeps me connected to emerging technology trends and informs the architectural decisions I make at enterprise scale.