Inception

If life was a book, every change would be a new chapter, I wrote already about the chapter I closed a few weeks ago, now I want to tell you about the one that I started writing.

Starting a new role comes with its own set of risks and challenges. I already wrote about why I decided to leave my previous role, a role I enjoyed for the most part. But among all the companies in the UAE, how and why did I end up in this one?

Everything started around March 2025. I was catching up with an old friend from dubizzle, the first company I joined here in Dubai and the one that paid all the relocation expenses for me to come here. He was also an ex-consultant, and he was telling me how much he didn’t miss the grind from consulting: the traveling, the slide decks, the pressure, the “yes sir” to the partners every time they requested a last-minute change that took an all-nighter to complete.

I was bragging about the projects I was working on at BCG, the Emirates Miles, and the Bonvoy points I had accumulated so far after so much flying and staying at Marriott hotels for work.

Yeah, I agreed the grind was difficult. I basically had no work schedule. I was there for as long as the firm needed me, doing whatever the firm needed me to do, at the highest standards and to the best of my abilities. The salary was good, the benefits were good, and the travel perks, or as I call them, the “side benefits”, were nice to have because BCG paid for the hotels and flights, but I got the points, which was a nice arrangement.

I have to admit, the seed about leaving was planted that day. My daughters were telling me they missed me. My wife was also telling me they were all happy about the things I brought back from the work trips, but it would be nicer to have me at home more often. He was bragging about not having to put in a lot of extra hours anymore, and that idea seemed great.

Meanwhile, I was getting staffed on projects in Europe, which meant I had to travel and stay for longer periods of time on every trip. I started to feel it. I started missing home. I started thinking about that conversation and started considering leaving the firm. That much travel was not sustainable for me anymore. I was feeling tired.

I started exploring the market casually. Not applying, but checking what companies were looking for, the skills they needed, freshening up my LinkedIn and my CV, just doing some prep work as a casual market explorer. My response to recruiters changed from “I’m not looking for a new role at the moment, thanks a ton for taking me into account and reaching out” to “I’m not actively looking, but if the right opportunity appears, I’m keen to take it”.

After a few months, around August 2025, I was catching up with my friend again, and I mentioned that he had made me jealous of his “not having to be overworked” and “not having to travel every week”. I told him I was considering moving on.

We left the conversation there, but after a couple of months he texted me: “Bro, you want job? Inception? I’m hiring for my team, you’ll love it here.”

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know the company at all, and it was in Abu Dhabi. The commute didn’t sound too sexy.

I was looking for a role at a company that worked with AI, but not one that was just “building the next ChatGPT”. I wanted to join a company building something that was solving a problem or adding value in some way. One day, I ended up on Inception’s website. It turns out they were not only building GenAI-powered applications at the enterprise level, they were also building models in Arabic and Hindi to preserve cultural value in the agentic world.

I also found out that Inception was born as a research institute, so it has close ties to academia through Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. That sounded interesting. A few weeks later, it was in the news that they had signed an agreement with the US to build the first GPU data center in the region. That sounded exciting.

I messaged him: “Hey, let’s do it. Where do I apply?”

I started interviewing for Principal Software Engineer. I was cracking the interviews, but somewhere in the middle, HR called. Because of my background in consulting, they thought I was a great fit for the Architecture Principal role as well, and they asked me if I wanted to interview for that role too. I agreed.

I ended up passing both interviews, so the ball was in my court, and I had to choose which role to accept.

I ended up going for the architecture position. Designing systems and thinking about how things should work is something I am enjoying more these days than implementing the whole thing myself.

And that is how this new chapter started. Not with a perfect plan, but with a conversation, a bit of curiosity, a few signs that it was time to move on, and an opportunity that slowly started to make sense. It is still early, and I know every new chapter comes with its own unknowns, but this one feels like the right one to be writing now.

If you want to follow me through this new journey and get to know what I'm working on, what new things I'm learning and what the transition from Software Engineer to Architect looks like, consider subscribing!