I’m Usama Khaliq, a Prompt Engineer at Activate Intelligence, based in London.
My path here was shaped mostly by not knowing what I wanted to do, and making that work in my favour. Born in Lahore, raised in Bolzano in the Italian Alps, I picked a liceo scientifico over a more vocational school because I had no idea what career I wanted and a theoretical education kept every door open. That instinct (stay flexible, stay curious, decide later) has pretty much guided every choice since.
I moved to London at 18 for a BSc in Computer Science (First Class Honours), then rolled straight into an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Distinction) at London Metropolitan University. Each step felt less like a plan and more like buying myself time to figure things out while staying in fields that genuinely interested me. Eventually the real world caught up, and it turned out all that theoretical wandering had landed me exactly where I needed to be.
I joined Activate Intelligence in its early days and have been shaping its AI work since. My day job is making large language models actually useful: designing prompts, architecting agent systems, and closing the gap between what AI can do in a demo and what it can do in production. What keeps me here is the frontier. New models, new capabilities, and a nagging curiosity about whether any of it resembles real reasoning. I might chase that question into a PhD one day.
I speak English and Italian fluently, Urdu at home, and enough German to get through school in Bolzano. My dreams default to English, though I’m not entirely sure about that.
When I’m not working, you’ll find me on a mountain bike. I cycled constantly growing up in the mountains around Bolzano, lost the habit after moving to London, and recently got back on a new MTB. The city isn’t the Dolomites, but it’s good to be riding again. Otherwise it’s houseplants, wandering through London parks trying to name trees, or reading about bumblebees. I’m drawn to philosophy in the same way. Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing” and Kant’s “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me” are the kind of ideas I keep coming back to. Fitting, for someone who built a career out of not knowing what to do next.