nate whitaker

I'm a multi-domain cybersecurity engineer with 29 years in the field — spanning mainframes, networking, compliance, vulnerability management, penetration testing, forensics, and application security. That breadth is the foundation; what I'm building on top of it is what matters now. My papers indicate that I am a CISSP and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

My current focus is software engineering and applied AI. I run the enterprise SAST program at a Fortune 500 healthcare company, where I've built a five-layer triage pipeline using local LLMs to cut analyst noise by orders of magnitude. I write production Python, design agentic systems, and treat models as components in real engineering — not magic. Where I'm heading: deeper into AI-native security tooling, autonomous triage and remediation, and the kind of local-first systems that don't ship sensitive data to someone else's cloud.

I'm a polymath by practice. I learn every new domain as if I'll have to teach it tomorrow — that constraint forces me to lock in fundamentals and build mental systems instead of collecting trivia. It's how I went from BBS-era hacker to sysadmin to network engineer to AppSec to AI systems builder, and it's why a problem in one domain often unlocks a solution in another. Outside the day job: writer, maker, black belt in Okinawan kempo, working English, conversational Spanish and French, enough Yiddish to make my grandmother smile.