Security Engineer
Enabling secure growth for startups and enterprises through scalable security solutions🚀
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Zahid AliSecurity Engineer
Automation Advocate · Mentor
Hi 👋 I’m Zahid—a self-taught cybersecurity professional with 3+ years of hands-on industry experience, passionate about building and securing systems at scale without slowing teams down.
Key Areas of Expertise:
“Security should empower innovation—not slow it down.”
Certifications
Key Projects
Automated Pipeline Security & Remediation
Integrated secrets scanning, SCA, SAST, and other security checks into GitHub Actions. Built end-to-end automation to extract critical issues, send Slack updates, and create detailed Jira tickets for faster remediation of code and dependency risks.
Log Ingestion Optimisation into SIEM
Redesigned and optimised the log forwarding pipeline from Jamf Protect (EDR) to Google SecOps (formerly Chronicle SIEM) by adding AWS SQS between S3 and SecOps, reducing ingestion latency by 73% (from 15 to 4 minutes)—enabling faster detection of incidents on endpoints.
End-to-End Incident Detection & Response
Established a comprehensive incident detection and response (IDR) capability from the ground up, including building an asset inventory with prioritised attack scenarios, developing an incident response plan, creating custom detection rules in SIEM, and automating SIEM-to-PagerDuty on-call alerts with Tines workflows.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Rollout
Led the end-to-end rollout of Data Loss Prevention (DLP)—from vendor evaluation and PoCs to developing and enforcing a comprehensive data classification policy, configuring Google Workspace and Nightfall AI DLP, and integrating DLP alerts into SIEM for real-time monitoring and rapid response.
IAM & Backup Database Access Hardening
Reviewed and hardened IAM roles and backup databases access by removing excessive permissions from custom engineering roles, enforcing approval workflows for activating breakglass and other privileged roles via a dedicated Slack channel, and integrating admin action audit logs into SIEM—reducing the risk of data loss and improving traceability.
Security Awareness & Human Risk Management
Drove the adoption and rollout of a security awareness and human risk management platform, deploying automated AI-driven, tailor-made phishing simulations for different departments and micro-learning modules to train users for real-world threats, proactively reduce human cyber risk, and ensure regulatory compliance.
Services
Endpoint Security
Deployment of Endpoint Detection and Response tools on Mac & Windows, implementation of hardening policies aligned with industry best practices, custom analytics, and guaranteed full visibility across all endpoints.
Detection & Response
Build incident detection and response processes, workflows, and tools from the ground up using SIEM, SOAR, custom detection rules, integrated threat intelligence, and automation playbooks/runbooks to stop threats fast.
Application Security
Establish DevSecOps environments and shift-left security through automation, secure coding practices, SAST, DAST, SCA, and threat modeling for software applications, enabling fast releases and reducing vulnerabilities.
Cloud Security
Configure multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) environments, perform security reviews, and use Terraform for consistent infrastructure deployment, all aligned with industry best practices.
Get in touch to discuss your requirements and receive tailored solutions.
Contact
Reach out for collaborations, mentorship, career coaching, or just to connect.
I’m always open to new ideas and opportunities!