We built the IT consulting firm we'd want to hire.
SMEnode is senior-only and based in North York, Toronto, working with organisations across Canada. The architect who designs your system builds it, runs it, and still picks up the phone a year later.
Because the usual model kept breaking good projects. A typical firm sells you with one team, scopes you with a second and delivers with a third. By week two, the person who understood your problem has moved on to the next deal. We watched that happen for fifteen years. SMEnode was set up in 2021 to work the other way round: one senior engineer from the first call to steady state.
The problem
Enterprise networking, data centres, cloud and security, seen up close. On project after project the work went from sales to scoping to delivery, and a little context fell out at each step. Requirements got reinterpreted. Design decisions lost their reasons. The client paid for the gap, usually twice.
Our answer
One principal owns your engagement, start to finish. That person can rack a GPU server, design the fabric it plugs into, and build the retrieval pipeline that runs on top. Most AI consultancies can't do the first two. Most infrastructure firms can't do the third. We cover the whole stack, from layer one to the LLM, and your data stays in Canada while we do it.
To give Canadian organisations senior engineering they can trust with their network, their security and their AI. One principal designs, builds and runs each system. Data stays in Canadian regions unless you tell us otherwise. No handoffs, and no junior bench learning on your production network.
Three commitments. Each one costs us work we could otherwise take.
You deal with the person doing the work, not an account manager passing messages along. When something breaks at 2 a.m., the engineer on the call already knows why the design looks the way it does.
Every engagement is led by a principal with 15+ years in production environments. We don't staff juniors and bill you for their learning curve. It's also why we say no to projects we can't staff properly.
Canadian privacy law doesn't actually force your data to stay in the country. PIPEDA asks for comparable protection wherever it goes. We keep it here anyway, in Canadian cloud regions, because it's the easiest position to defend to a board or an auditor. For Quebec clients we plan around Law 25 from day one, since it asks for a privacy impact assessment before personal information leaves the province, and that includes a server in Toronto.
Because you can check our credentials instead of taking our word for them. Each area below links to the work behind it.
Our founder holds the CCIE Data Center, verifiable on Credly. The team also holds CCIE Security and CCDE. CCIE and CCDE are the expert tier of Cisco's certification track, and the CCIE ends in an eight-hour hands-on lab.
A multi-pod data-centre fabric on Cisco ACI. An application-aware WAN edge on SD-WAN. Both designed and run by the same principal.
Layer 4-7 application delivery with an advanced WAF on F5, and Zero Trust built around identity first.
Architecture, migration and run on AWS. Landing zones on Azure. Workloads and data services on GCP. Retrieval-augmented generation grounded in your own documents, hosted where your data already lives.
SOC 2 security and availability controls, ISO 27001, PIPEDA, Quebec's Law 25, and readiness for Bill C-8, the federal cyber security law passed in June 2026 that isn't in force yet.
Saeid Khanipour Ghobadi founded SMEnode and still designs the architecture clients buy. A CCIE Data Center with 15+ years across enterprise networking, data centre, cloud and applied AI, Saeid scopes each engagement and stays on it through delivery. When you hire SMEnode, you're hiring the architect, not a sales deck.
Founder and CEO · CCIE Data Center
Most clients start with one practice and add the next once the first is running. The same principal stays across all of it.
Seven organisations in six sectors: a semiconductor company, a fashion retailer, two pet retailers, a lighting distributor, a research university and a municipal government. Every one runs a different stack under a different regulator. Every one gets the same senior team from the first call to handover.
Semiconductors
Fashion retail
Pet retail
University
Lighting distribution
Pet retail
Municipal governmentDifferent stacks and regulators. The same senior team.
Our office is in North York, Toronto, Ontario. We work with clients across Canada, and most of an engagement runs remotely: design sessions, configuration, monitoring. When a project needs hands in the rack, we come on site.
US work is on the roadmap. It isn't something we sell today.
Let's connect
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