A security architect who came up through infrastructure.

Active Directory, Exchange, VMware — the unglamorous layer that keeps companies alive. Security was a detour that became the job. Eleven years in, I still think identity is the most interesting problem in the field.

On the side I run Diallo Group— a small advisory practice helping mid-market companies retire phishing instead of managing it. Identity-first programs, the kind of work I've done inside teams for a decade, just packaged for companies that don't have a CISO yet.

I came up writing code before I came up writing policies. Computer science at SUNY Albany, then years on infrastructure, then security. Lately I've been coding again — evenings and weekends — small Next.js and React apps that mostly exist so I can see where AI coding tools still ship insecure defaults. The offensive instinct from the security side meets the builder instinct from the engineering side. Both stay sharper that way.

Roles

2022 –
Principal Security Engineer · Microsoft
Defender for Cloud Apps & Defender for Identity — detection engineering at Microsoft enterprise scale.
2020 – 22
Architecture & Analysis Lead · BNY Mellon
Led the architecture & analysis team. Rebuilt the enterprise vulnerability program for Treasury Services under SOX/GLBA.
2015 – 20
Sr. Information Security Analyst · NY State Department of Health
Owned HIPAA/HITECH compliance and two federal ATOs (CMS, IRS 1075) for an 8M-patient marketplace.

Thinking about

01Identity is the actual security perimeter.
02Most “AI-powered” security tools are priced like a theory.
03The slow way is usually the fast way.
04Infrastructure that exists is not infrastructure that works.

Credentials

CISSPMicrosoft SC-100AZ-500AWS Solutions Architect

Off-hours

Building: Small Next.js and React apps. Vibe-coding the way most of the internet now does — partly to enjoy it, partly to map where AI tools still skip secure-by-default.
Watching: Agentic identities, the next attack surface. The seam between server and client rendering. Where the AI coding stack is still quietly insecure by default.
Reading: History, systems thinking, the occasional novel. Recently: The Unaccountability Machine.
Running: Slow miles before the world wakes up.
Guinea: Thinking about what AI changes for the country I came from. The tech gap is real, but it might also be the first generation that closes faster than it widens.
Languages: English, French, Fulani — in that order of fluency, depending on the day.

Education

2011 – 15
B.S. Computer Science · SUNY Albany
Teaching assistant for intro CS. Ran STEM incubator programs for the local community.