When Global Experience Comes Home: Interview with Andreea Bulisache, Stratified Advisory
A growing number of senior leaders are redefining how global expertise engages with emerging and transition markets. Rather than returning in a traditional sense, these executives remain actively embedded in international ecosystems across technology, capital, and governance, while contributing selectively where their experience can generate disproportionate strategic value.
In this interview series, Oana Ciornei, Managing Partner at Amrop Romania and Amrop Board Member, speaks with internationally active leaders whose careers have been shaped across continents, sectors, and institutional environments. These conversations explore how operating at scale across diverse regulatory regimes, cultures, and market dynamics reshapes leadership judgment, decision-making, and long-term accountability.
What distinguishes these leaders is not geographic mobility, but systems fluency. Repeated exposure to complexity: new markets, new governance models, and high-stakes transitions sharpens perspective and accelerates leadership maturity. The result is an operating mindset anchored in contextual judgment, disciplined execution, and sustainable value creation rather than local optimization.
In this second conversation of the series (find the first one here), Oana speaks with Andreea Bulisache, Founder of Stratified Advisory, about her international career spanning technology, cybersecurity, AI governance, and board work. The discussion examines how sustained engagement across global technology platforms, public-sector institutions, and capital markets has shaped her leadership approach and what lessons Romania can draw from leaders who operate globally while contributing with precision to local ecosystems.
Q: Could you briefly outline your international projects - what positions have you held and where?
A: My career has been fundamentally international. Of roughly 20 years of professional experience, only about three were primarily Romania-based; the remainder were spent in regional and global executive roles based in the Netherlands and the United States. I moved to Amsterdam five days after defending my undergraduate thesis and began my first international assignment alongside my Master’s studies, working for a global executive events firm focused on cybersecurity, risk, and financial services. During this period, I operated with direct C-suite exposure engaging regulators, financial institutions, and global technology leaders on early cyber risk, data protection, and digital trust agendas. This formative experience led me to formalize my expertise through CISA and CISSP certifications. After completing an international MBA with modules in Europe, China, and South Africa, I joined Microsoft, where I spent nearly a decade in progressively senior leadership roles across Amsterdam, Redmond (global headquarters), and EMEA.
My roles in Microsoft included:
- Senior Business Strategy Director, Acquisitions, Partnerships & Investments, working with global leadership on ecosystem strategy, AI roadmaps, and post-merger integration of GitHub and Databricks
- National Technology Officer and Member of the Leadership Team, Microsoft Romania, with accountability for national AI, cloud, and cybersecurity strategy across public and regulated sectors
- Senior global leadership roles spanning AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and ecosystem development across 30+ markets, operating at the intersection of global strategy, public policy, and commercial execution
Q: Beyond operational leadership, your work increasingly focused on technology governance at system level, righty?
A: Yes. I contributed to EU-aligned frameworks shaping the interpretation and implementation of the AI Act, Cybersecurity Act, Data Act, and data sovereignty models supporting governments, boards, and regulated industries in translating regulatory intent into executable architectures. In parallel, I hold and have held non-executive and advisory board roles across academia, non-profits, and technology scale-ups, and I currently continue to operate internationally through my advisory practice, working with boards, investors, and leadership teams across Europe and the U.S. In short, my international experience has been less about mobility and more about operating authority across systems technology, regulation, capital, and governance, supported by a strong international network that remains central to how I create value today.
Q: How has your international experience shaped your leadership style?
A: Decisively. International exposure striped away all my assumptions and forced me to confront complexity, ambiguity, and differences: cultural, regulatory, and institutional. My leadership style has evolved toward systems thinking, contextual judgment, and disciplined execution. I learned early that what looks like “best practice” in one market may fail entirely in another unless adapted to governance structures, talent maturity, and societal expectations. This experience also sharpened my respect for trust as a leadership currency. In global environments, authority is rarely positional, it is earned through consistency, clarity, and the ability to connect strategy with local realities while maintaining global coherence.
Q: What motivated you to take assignments abroad?
A: Scale and impact were primary drivers, but equally important was curiosity and a strong desire to understand how complex systems actually work. I have always been motivated by environments where decisions ripple across markets, industries, and institutions, and where understanding cause and effect requires operating beyond a single geography. Technology, capital, and policy are deeply interconnected. Remaining in one market felt limiting when the real leverage lies in seeing how those systems interact globally. International assignments continuously stretched my thinking, tested my assumptions, and refined my judgment. They placed me in contexts where learning is constant across cultures, regulatory regimes, and operating models and where growth comes from navigating complexity rather than avoiding it.
Q: From your experience, what are the main challenges women face in building international careers in technology and cybersecurity?
A: Two challenges consistently surface. First, self-limiting beliefs, often reinforced by the scarcity of visible female role models at senior international and board levels in technology and cybersecurity. Many women underestimate how attainable global executive roles are when approached with long-term intent, sponsorship, and governance credibility. Second, sustainability pressure. Senior international roles, particularly in AI and cybersecurity, operate at high velocity and accountability. Without clarity on personal boundaries and strong support systems, the load can become unnecessarily prohibitive. When those foundations are in place, there are no structural barriers to women performing at the highest levels. I was fortunate to work alongside senior leaders, both men and women, who demonstrated authority through substance, judgment, and consistency rather than displays of authority. Several women in executive and board roles had a particularly strong influence on me. They combined intellectual rigor, composure under pressure, and long-term institutional thinking, and showed that credibility at the top is built through responsibility for complex trade-offs. These experiences shaped how I lead and mentor today: representation matters, but stewardship, accountability, and trust matter more.
Q: How has your experience shaped your approach to AI governance and responsible technology adoption?
A: Working across Europe and the United States in global technology, public-sector, and board advisory roles made it clear to me that AI must be governed as infrastructure, not deployed as a feature. In multi-jurisdictional environments, weak governance quickly becomes regulatory, reputational, and systemic risk. This experience shaped my conviction that AI stewardship is a board-level responsibility, requiring ethics, cybersecurity, data sovereignty, sustainability, and capital discipline to be embedded into architecture decisions from the start. That principle underpins my AI governance work and my co-authorship of The Next AI Imperative, which positions governing intelligence as an executive and fiduciary mandate, not a technical afterthought.
Q: What key differences do you see between mature tech ecosystems and Romania?
A: Mature tech ecosystems operate with clarity of mission and strong governance coherence. They function as integrated systems, most often a quadruple helix of public sector, private enterprise, academia, and civil society - where roles are well defined and incentives are aligned. The most advanced ecosystems are now evolving toward a fifth dimension, embedding environmental considerations directly into innovation and industrial policy. A critical differentiator is how early talent is integrated. In mature ecosystems, education systems are closely connected to industry needs, and students are exposed early to real-world applications through internships, applied research, open innovation programs, and partnerships between universities and employers. This creates a continuous pipeline from education to impact, rather than a gap between theory and practice. Romania has exceptional technical talent and strong academic foundations. The opportunity lies in strengthening system-level coordination between education, industry, and policy, creating clearer pathways for early talent to engage with innovation ecosystems, and establishing long-term governance frameworks that build institutional trust. Doing so would help convert talent density into sustained global influence rather than isolated success stories.
Q: How has your international exposure influenced how you build relationships and develop people?
A: Working in international environments fundamentally shaped how I build relationships and develop people. Operating across cultures, markets, and regulatory contexts taught me to lead with curiosity, listen before judging, and establish trust through clarity rather than proximity or hierarchy. This led me to adopt a consistent operating model across teams: CARE - Clarity, Awareness, Readiness, Execution. In diverse, high-pressure environments, teams often default to execution before aligning on purpose, constraints, or capability. By slowing teams down at the right moments, I help them align across differences, strengthen judgment, and execute with confidence and accountability. That balances trust first, followed by decisive action has proven essential in building resilient global teams.
Q: What responsibility do senior technology leaders have toward the next generation?
A: Senior technology leaders have a responsibility to develop judgment and expand access. This means not only mentoring individuals, but actively creating opportunities through internships, open days, applied projects, and exposure to real-world decision-making that raise awareness and interest early. Beyond skills, leaders must provide context: helping the next generation understand the economic, societal, and ethical systems their work will influence. Effective mentorship is less about answers and more about framing the right questions, setting standards, and modeling accountability. By opening doors and building trust, senior leaders help cultivate informed, responsible future leaders and ensure the long-term resilience of the technology ecosystem.
Q: In your non-executive director roles, what perspectives do you uniquely bring to the boardroom?
A: As a board member, I focus on ensuring that technology-related decisions are governed with the same rigor as financial, operational, and strategic choices. I bring a perspective that treats AI, cybersecurity, and data as enterprise-wide risk and value drivers, squarely within the board’s fiduciary responsibility. Drawing on my background across global technology organizations and public-sector engagement, I contribute to board discussions on resilience, regulatory exposure, data sovereignty, and long-term trust. I help the board assess how technology decisions will affect enterprise value, compliance, and reputation over time not just in the next reporting cycle. My contribution is grounded in shared accountability: helping the board collectively exercise informed oversight, challenge assumptions when needed, and steward the organization through increasing technological and regulatory complexity.
Q: What advice would you give Romanian technology leaders considering an international assignment and a return home?
A: I would suggest that they pursue an international assignment deliberately and with long-term intent. International experience develops more than technical or managerial skill; it builds judgment, an understanding of how decisions play out across systems, cultures, and institutions. For those who return, the responsibility is not to import tactics, but to apply systems thinking: to raise standards, challenge entrenched assumptions, and contribute to institutional maturity rather than reproduce familiar patterns.
Q: How do you see the role of technology leaders evolving as AI, regulation, and societal expectations intersect?
A: Technology leaders are increasingly becoming institutional stewards. Their role now sits at the intersection of innovation, governance, and public trust. As AI becomes embedded in economic and social infrastructure, leadership will be measured less by speed of deployment and more by the ability to design systems that are resilient, accountable, and aligned with regulatory and societal expectations over time.
Q: What would you recommend to organizations in Romania to better leverage returning leaders’ experience?
A: Provide mandate and authority, not symbolic roles. Returning leaders create the most value when they are empowered to influence governance models, talent development, and strategic priorities. Confining them to narrow operational responsibilities underutilizes their international exposure, judgment, and networks and limits the broader institutional benefit their experience can bring.
Q: In one sentence: how has working internationally changed you as a technology leader?
A: It taught me to think in systems, learn continuously, act with humility, and lead with responsibility where decisions scale across borders, institutions, and generations.
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