Career History

This is where I learned what "hard" really means at internet scale.

I joined Cloudflare's escalation team to handle the cases that frontline support couldn't resolve — complex network anomalies, platform-level incidents, bugs that only surfaced under specific conditions. Every case was different. There was no playbook for most of them.

My job was to own the problem completely: dig into packet captures, BGP routing tables, infrastructure logs, and product internals until I understood exactly what was happening and why. Then translate that into clear, honest communication for customers who needed answers — and actionable bug reports for engineering teams who needed precision.

My entry into Cloudflare — and my first exposure to threat defence at true global scale.

I joined the Network Security Engineer(NSE) team during a period when volumetric attacks were breaking records. My day-to-day involved real-time traffic analysis: distinguishing legitimate requests from malicious ones by examining IP reputation, HTTP headers, cookie patterns, and JavaScript fingerprints — often under active attack conditions with no margin for error.

I worked with Magic Transit, Cloudflare Network Firewall (Magic Firewall), WAF, and rate-limiting tools to filter and neutralise threats across layers 3, 4, and 7. Beyond the firefighting, I contributed to product improvement — identifying gaps in tooling and working directly with engineering to close them.

This role taught me to think fast, document precisely, and never mistake correlation for root cause.

A short contract between chapters — brought in to deliver network security architecture for a new infrastructure project. Covered the full lifecycle from pre-sales discovery through Low-Level Design, BoM validation, and implementation planning.

Eight years. The formative stretch.

GBM was where I went from engineer to consultant — learning not just how to build things, but how to listen to what customers actually need, translate ambiguity into architecture, and deliver complex projects without excuses.

I designed and implemented solutions across Routing & Switching, Wireless, Unified Communications, Contact Centres, and Cybersecurity — often owning projects end-to-end from the first customer conversation to final operational handover. The diversity of technologies was demanding. The accountability was total.

This is where I built the judgment that technical training alone can't teach.

Where it started. Fresh out of university, learning networks by building them — staging equipment, implementing designs, troubleshooting failures, and handing over to operations teams who depended on the work being right.

The early years were unglamorous and essential. They built the foundation everything else stands on.