My career didn’t exactly follow a straight line. I started with a degree in Chemical Engineering, but I was more drawn to new experiences than a traditional career path at first.
After almost 6 years working in remote locations, I spent a few years following my passions: from snowboarding in different countries to becoming a dive instructor in Cairns. Looking back, those years were an accidental education in adaptability and learning how to connect with people from all walks of life.
Eventually though, I knew I needed to apply that energy to a long-term challenge.
I landed at a recruitment agency in Sydney, and the corporate environment was a stark contrast to my past adventures.
I was quickly struck by the limitations. Recruiters were siloed, and bound by the state they worked in. I saw a global industry being managed with a local mindset. I didn’t want to be constrained by lines on a map. Driven by this motivation, I built a global oil and gas desk from the ground up, connecting talent and opportunities across the world.
It was during this time that a new technology started to emerge: LinkedIn.
Watching its rise, I had a powerful realisation: the entire agency model was about to be fundamentally disrupted. The future wasn’t in closely guarded databases, but in global networks. That single insight sparked my first entrepreneurial venture, TheOilCommunity.com. It was a trial by fire in building something from nothing.
That grit eventually led to Google.
Google was where my engineering mindset and recruitment experience finally merged. It was my first chance to build and optimise hiring processes at an unprecedented scale, surrounded by some of the most brilliant technical minds on the planet.
It was structured, it was exciting, and it felt like a pivotal moment of my journey.
But my next role at AWS would give me the chance to apply those lessons on a global stage and, unexpectedly, place me at the very heart of an AI revolution that was about to ignite.