Career Vision
🧭 North Star
In 1–3 sentences, what does career success look like for you at its fullest?
As technology advances faster than most people can follow, the gap between those who understand it and those who don’t is becoming a civil liberties issue, not just a technical one. I want to be someone who deeply understands the threats hiding in that gap and builds the defenses that protect people and organizations from them. Success means being a recognized expert in defensive security, someone with the technical depth to own hard problems, the experience to have built infrastructure that operates at scale, and the credibility that comes from having earned it from the ground up.
🔭 Long-Term Vision (5–10 Years)
Where do I want to be professionally?
Cloud Security Engineer at a major tech company, owning and building security infrastructure that operates at massive scale. This is a role earned through a deliberate progression: SOC Analyst I → SOC Analyst II → Detection Engineer → Security Engineer → Cloud Security Engineer.
What kind of work do I want to be doing day-to-day?
- Designing and building cloud security architecture: detection systems, identity and access controls, infrastructure hardening, and security automation
- Working on problems with high stakes and technical complexity
- Being the person colleagues bring their hardest security problems to, and having the depth to actually solve them
What kind of impact do I want to have?
- At the organizational level, building security infrastructure that protects millions of users and systems
- At a broader level,
- helping to educate and protect the people and institutions that rely on technology, but don’t fully understand the associated risks and threats
- contributing to shape the future of technology policy and cyberlaw in a way that works for people, not against them
What kind of company or environment do I want to work in?
- A large tech company with a first-class security function
- An environment with
- incredibly brilliant, curious, and passionate engineers to learn from
- complex cloud infrastructure to work on
- the impact to make the work genuinely meaningful
What does my ideal compensation and lifestyle look like?
- A compensation and balanced work life that allows me to build a life with my family
🪜 Medium-Term Vision (2–3 Years)
The bridge between where you are now and your long-term vision. What needs to be true in 2–3 years for you to be on track?
Target role or level:
Mid-level SOC Analyst or junior Security Engineer
- Beyond entry-level triage work into more complex detection engineering, threat hunting, or security tooling
- SOC Analyst → SOC Analyst 2 → Detection Engineer → Security Engineer
Skills and experience I need to have built:
- Solid SIEM fluency (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or equivalent) from real incident work
- Hands-on experience with the full alert lifecycle — triage, investigation, escalation, documentation
- Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform from a security perspective
- A home lab or project portfolio that demonstrates initiative beyond the day job
- Certifications: BTL1, a cloud certification
What I want my reputation to be:
- Someone who takes ownership, asks good questions, and goes deeper than required
- An analyst who doesn’t just close tickets but actually wants to understand what happened and why
- Someone who who other team members trust to handle hard problems
Milestones I want to hit:
- Land first SOC Analyst or security internship role
- Complete B.S. in Cybersecurity
- Earn BTL1 Certification
- Build and document a home lab demonstrating core SOC skills
- Contribute to at least one detection rule, playbook, or process improvement at work
🌱 Where I Am Now
Current situation:
- Cybersecurity student, career changer, applying to first roles in new field
What I’m excited about:
- Ability to learn and grow from talented individuals and make an impact
My biggest perceived gap right now:
- Hard skills and experience