The beginning

I grew up in a small village in Romania where the expectation was that people like me didn’t go to the top high school in the region. I went anyway. The first year nearly broke me. My classmates had tutors, better preparation, and years of context I didn’t have. I failed to keep up.

Rather than finding help, I worked it out systematically. I stopped trying to catch up and started breaking down every problem to its foundation until I understood the logic behind it. I taught myself programming from scratch. By the time I finished high school, I was back at the top.

The lesson wasn’t about resilience in the self-help sense. It was more concrete: if the system isn’t going to help you, you build your own.

2008 – 2022: The long way around

I moved to Saudi Arabia in 2008, which meant leaving Romania with 25% of my high school incomplete. New country, different language, a culture I didn’t know how to read. I had a lot of time to figure out what came next.

I finished my diploma through Penn Foster, a US-based online program. That one course turned into 13 years of self-paced learning, a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, and a lot of time thinking about how education works when no one is structuring it for you.

For a while I was pointed at cybersecurity. I attended the Cybersecurity Leadership Summit in 2021, engaged enough to be recognized as a top participant, and started building the groundwork for a career change. Certifications cost money, so I worked in a couple of startup roles while saving up.

Neither lasted. One I left for ethical reasons. The other shut down when the founder decided he didn’t want to run a business. Both were short, but both gave me something operational: budgets, coordination, client relationships. The cybersecurity goal eventually gave way to something that fit better.

2022 – 2024: Operations at scale

I joined Codeless in March 2022 as an account manager. Over two years I moved through five roles: Account Manager, Operations Strategist, Production Manager, Head of Production, Director of Production. Each step was built on something broken that I fixed.

The early work was documentation. There were no SOPs, no training, no process maps. I reverse-engineered workflows by digging through task histories and built the documentation from scratch. When it came time to train new hires, I gave them what I’d had to build myself.

The operations work expanded from there. I built the systems that handled content production for a 45-person remote team across more than 30 clients. I led team restructures twice without layoffs, by finding internal transitions that matched people’s actual skills. I handled hiring end-to-end, built performance frameworks, and kept production running through two rounds of budget cuts.

When my role ended in August 2024, the systems were in place. That’s what I care about: building something that holds up after you step away from it.

2025 – present: Operations meets AI

In late 2025, I joined Foundation Marketing as a Senior Account Coordinator. Within four months I moved into a new role: AI Content Operations Lead, a seat that hadn’t existed before.

I own the AI implementation roadmap, build the workflows the content team runs on, and lead the adoption work that turns AI from something people use occasionally into something the whole team depends on. I became an AirOps Champion, rebuilt production workflows from scratch, and wrote the company’s first AI governance policy.

What I keep coming back to: AI doesn’t change what operations is for. It changes what operations can do. The systems still need to be clear and ownership needs to be defined. Someone still has to think about what breaks three steps downstream. Those parts haven’t changed. The tools are just faster now.