Profile

Red team offensive security and application security pentest engineer, with a computer architecture background who loves the cloud and AI.

Experience

Robinhood Markets, Inc. (Austin, TX - Remote)

Senior Offensive Security Engineer, Penetration Testing Lead (Oct 2025 - Present)

• Penetration testing lead managing the internal pentest queue, scoping and prioritizing engagements, and driving remediation to closure with product teams.
• Executed application security reviews for microservices prior to public launches, identifying design and implementation risks early and aligning owners on mitigations.

Senior Offensive Security Engineer (Oct 2023 - Oct 2025)

• Performed collaborative red team exercises against the crypto custody environment, demonstrating tangible risk reduction for multiple billions of dollars in crypto assets.
• Led stealthy external-to-internal red team operations end-to-end, including phishing page design and building fingerprinting/payload gating to ensure implants were only served to internal employees.
• Leveraged Mythic for command-and-control and developed custom Mythic commands to support multiple TTPs that were initially undetected; partnered with blue team to close detection gaps.
• Coordinated cross-functional red/blue collaboration to improve security posture, detection coverage, and incident readiness.

Praetorian Security, Inc. (Austin, TX)

Lead DevSecOps Engineer (Mar 2020 - Oct 2023)

• Automated provisioning of cloud infrastructure with Terraform and ArgoCD to support Kubernetes workloads which greatly improved development velocity for Praetorian’s Chariot product.
• Improved security in the cluster using an Istio service mesh utilizing mTLS for pod-to-pod communication.
• Deployed Open Policy Agent (OPA) to secure the external API of Chariot using a multi-tenant RBAC model.
• Developed dashboards using Prometheus and Grafana to visualize stability of the Chariot platform, along with collecting security relevant metrics.
• Implemented an efficient serverless SIEM using GCP Cloud Functions, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub. Presented at Austin’s local DFIR group.
• Assisted IT team with completion of first SOC2 Type II certification for Praetorian.
• Deployed zero touch deployment of end-user workstations, providing seamless access to essential applications, while efficiently supporting end-user equipment during a period of extraordinary growth exceeding 100% throughout the challenges posed by COVID-19.

Lead Security Engineer (Oct 2018 - Mar 2020)

• Collaboratively executed purple team assessments with clients to improve their mean time to detection (MTTD) of various threat actors using the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.
• Led and successfully executed multiple NIST assessments for large clients with diverse subsidiaries, ensuring adherence to industry-leading security standards and regulatory compliance.
• Performed offensive penetration tests and vulnerability assessments for Fortune 1000 companies.

Senior Security Engineer (Jun 2017 - Oct 2018)

• Performed IoT security assessments against smart devices and medical devices.
• Mentored junior staff on conducing commodity internal and external security assements for clients.

Security Engineer Intern (May 2016 - Aug 2016)

• Executed social engineering phishing campaigns for user awareness training.
• Collaborated with colleagues for development of a streamlined internal reporting system.

ARM Holdings (Austin, TX)

Verification Enablement Engineer (Jan 2015 - Jul 2015)

• Wrote verification templates for compliance testing using a random architectural verification engine (RAVEN) for a variable vector length SIMD ISA.
• Benchmarked templates against architectural coverage to verify correctness.
• Developed directed tests which stressed the ISA using tables of “interesting” numbers.

National Instruments (Austin, TX)

Software Engineering Intern (May 2014 - Jul 2014)

• Backported new features to a Windows kernel driver.
• Implemented direct memory access functionality to improve performance.
• Interacted with the hardware team to verify the correct timing of the driver.

Telogis (Austin, TX)

Software Development Intern (May 2013 - Aug 2013)

• Coded a web application in ASP.NET MVC3, and JavaScript to execute scripts on remote linux machines.
• Developed an algorithm to filter invalid data for an application which reported the statistical probability that a driver would speed on a certain street.
• Interfaced a Raspberry pi to stress test the tracking units.

Education

• MS Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University (Aug 2015 - May 2017)
• BS Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin (Aug 2010 - Dec 2014)

Skills

High-level

• Go
• Python
• C#
• Java

Low-level

• C
• C++

Security

• Burp Suite
• Metasploit
• Nmap
• Wireshark
• Open Policy Agent

Containers

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• containerd

IaC

• Terraform
• ArgoCD
• Kustomize
• Helm

Logs, Data, & Visualization

• Prometheus
• Grafana
• BigQuery
• Stackdriver

Cloud

• GCP
• AWS
• Azure

Languages

• Romanian (Native)
• English (Native)

Certifications

• FAA Commercial Pilot, Airplane, Instrument Rating Aug 2025
• Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) Aug 2021
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Aug 2021
• GIAC Systems and Network Auditor (GSNA) Apr 2019

Interests

• Flying
• Skiing
• Paddleboarding
• Cooking
• Travelling