About Shanief

I am a security practitioner who refuses to choose between offensive precision and defensive resilience.

Too often, the security industry is divided into silos: Red Teams who break things and Blue Teams who fix them. My career has been dedicated to shattering that barrier. With a deep background in Explotation, Malware Analysis, and Digital Forensics, I build security strategies that are grounded in the adversarial reality.

My journey has taken me from the trenches of incident response to driving security engineering efforts at well-known government agencies and technology companies, including US Postal Service Office of Inspector General, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Google, Cox Communications, IBM, Slack, Dropbox, and Okta. I don't just theorize about "secure by design" — I have reverse-engineered the threats that dismantle those designs.

Today, my focus is twofold: Technical Excellence and People Leadership. I construct high-assurance cloud infrastructures that can withstand modern attacks, and I mentor the next generation of engineers to do the same... because security is not just a technical problem - it is a discipline of continuous learning, strategy, and adaptation.

History

A timeline of impact across the industry.

  • Headspace Head of Security Engineering & Cloud Ops
    2025 - Present
  • Meta Security Engineer, Surface Coverage
    2023 - 2025
  • Okta Manager & Principal Security Engineer, Detection & Response
    2022 - 2023
  • Dropbox Senior Security Engineer, Detection & Response
    2021 - 2022
  • Slack Senior Software Engineer, Security
    2020 - 2021
  • IBM Senior Cyber Threat Hunter
    2019 - 2020
  • Cox Communications Incident Response Lead
    2017 - 2018
  • Google Security Engineer, Security Surveillance Team
    2016 - 2017
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation Computer Scientist - Field Ops
    2013 - 2016
  • US Postal Service OIG Student Co-Op, Office of Audit
    2012

Arsenal & Qualifications

A multidisciplinary skillset validation across the security spectrum.

OFFENSE GXPN Exploit Researcher & Adv. Penetration Tester OFFENSE OSCP Offensive Security Certified Professional OFFENSE GPEN GIAC Penetration Tester OFFENSE GMOB Mobile Device Security Analyst DEFENSE GREM Reverse Engineering Malware DEFENSE GCFA Advanced Forensic Analyst DEFENSE GNFA Network Forensic Analyst DEFENSE GCIH Certified Incident Handler

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