My career started in the U.S. Navy — and the work I did there set the terms for everything that followed.
I served as Information Security Officer for Navy and Marine Corps maintenance commands across the Southwest region, based in San Diego. The timing was not incidental. My tenure ran through the rollout of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet — a $6.9 billion contract that was, at the time, the largest IT infrastructure outsourcing initiative in DoD history, consolidating thousands of disparate legacy networks into a single enterprise system across the entire Department of the Navy. Managing information security governance across all maintenance commands in that region, during that transition, meant operating at the intersection of unprecedented infrastructure change and zero tolerance for security failure.
Then September 11, 2001 happened. Every security posture, every access protocol, every assumption about threat landscape changed overnight. The work continued, under those conditions, without pause.
I carried that function forward as a civilian, serving as Information Security Officer for the 3rd Marine Air Wing. The uniform came off. The responsibility didn't.
My rank during that period was junior. The scope of what I was accountable for was not. That gap — between title and actual consequence — is something I've navigated in every role since. It's also where I learned that risk governance isn't a function of seniority. It's a function of clarity, discipline, and the willingness to stay until the problem is managed to resolution.
From there: network analyst, security engineer, solutions architect — each role adding technical depth to a foundation built under operational consequence. I progressed through that depth before moving into leadership, which means I don't manage engineers by translating between them and a business. I speak both languages natively.
At Alert Logic, I served as VP Global Sales Engineering — inheriting and leading a global SE organization across three geographies, US-West, North America, and Global, over a four-year tenure. Running an established organization at that scale, through multiple market cycles and competing internal priorities, is a different discipline than building one from scratch. It demands operational fluency, not just vision.
Brief assignments at Anitian and Palo Alto Networks gave me exposure to the enterprise security product market from both the vendor and advisory sides. Then at Coalfire, I built the solutions architecture and partnership practice from the ground up — constructing the AWS and Microsoft alliance portfolio, the partner governance frameworks, and the enterprise systems architecture function that now serves clients across federal, defense, and commercial sectors. Coalfire is where I built. Alert Logic is where I led. Both matter. They're different credentials.