Skip to content

Career log

Three years of security engineering across offense, defense, and detection.

Head of Security Engineering

Sports Excitement · Remote

Jan 2025 - Present

20+

Penetration tests

40%

Critical vulns cut

100%

Production uptime

  • Ran 20+ web app and API penetration tests across the production platform, manually mapping the attack surface to uncover IDOR, stored XSS, and authentication bypasses missed by automated scanners; drove a 40% reduction in critical vulnerabilities.
  • Secured VPS infrastructure from the ground up: rewrote firewall rules in the IONOS Cloud Panel, configured a NAT Gateway for outbound-only VM exposure, enforced SSH key authentication, and established a patching cadence that maintained 100% production uptime.
  • Deployed Cloudflare WAF in front of production with custom firewall rules targeting active scraping and DDoS patterns; configured rate limiting and Cloudflare Access to put internal tooling behind strict identity verification.
  • Neutralized a live cryptojacking and data-exfiltration attempt by tracing process trees, cron persistence, and outbound C2 traffic; evicted the loader, remediated the initial access vector, and authored custom Splunk detections to prevent recurrence.
  • Directed quarterly attack surface reviews with the CTO, translating technical findings into business risk and co-designing network segmentation that reduced overall exposure by 30%; authored the company's foundational incident response playbook.

Graduate Teaching Assistant

University of Maryland · College Park, MD

Aug 2024 - Jan 2025

  • Facilitated weekly DFIR labs for 60+ graduate students covering Splunk log analysis, Volatility memory forensics, and full-chain compromise reconstructions.
  • Engineered Python scripts to auto-generate realistic, randomized artifact sets per student, preventing reliance on static scenarios and improving investigation authenticity.

Security Engineer

Phoenix Global · Hyderabad, India

Jun 2022 - Aug 2023

  • Engineered 25+ custom Splunk correlation rules and programmed Python triage automation, reducing SOC false positives by 30% and saving the security team 15 hours of manual log review per week.
  • Audited IAM policies and security configurations across 50+ AWS assets, co-authoring a technical remediation guide for over-privileged roles and logging gaps that reduced overall cloud risk exposure by 35%.