Maya Okonkwo

Cloud Security Engineer
Seattle, WA maya.okonkwo@gmail.com +1 (206) 555-0198

About

Cloud security engineer with 7+ years of experience in securing distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines. I specialize in threat modeling, identity and access management, vulnerability assessment, and building security automation that integrates into engineering workflows.

I've worked across fintech, healthcare, and SaaS — helping organizations meet SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 compliance requirements while maintaining developer velocity. I believe security should be an enabler, not a bottleneck.

Experience

Senior Cloud Security Engineer
Cobalt Defense — Seattle, WA
  • Architected cloud security posture across AWS and GCP environments serving 200+ enterprise customers.
  • Designed and implemented a centralized secrets management system using HashiCorp Vault, reducing secret sprawl by 80%.
  • Led incident response for 6 major security events, coordinating across engineering, legal, and executive teams.
  • Built automated compliance monitoring pipelines (SOC 2, ISO 27001) that cut audit preparation time from weeks to days.
Security Engineer
Meridian Health Tech — Remote
  • Managed IAM policies, network segmentation, and encryption standards across a HIPAA-compliant infrastructure.
  • Developed internal security tooling in Python to automate vulnerability scanning across 1,200+ cloud resources.
  • Conducted penetration testing on web applications and internal services, identifying and remediating 40+ critical findings.
  • Delivered security awareness training to 300+ engineers, reducing phishing susceptibility by 62%.
Security Analyst
BridgePay — Austin, TX
  • Monitored and triaged SIEM alerts, investigating an average of 80 security events per week.
  • Assisted in PCI DSS Level 1 compliance audits, documenting control implementations and evidence collection.
  • Built dashboards and alerting rules in Splunk that improved mean time to detection by 45%.

Selected Projects

Cloud Asset Inventory & Risk Scanner

Open-source tool written in Go that enumerates cloud assets across AWS, GCP, and Azure, scores them against CIS benchmarks, and generates prioritized remediation reports. 800+ GitHub stars.

IAM Policy Analyzer

Internal service that parses cloud IAM policies, visualizes permission graphs, and flags over-privileged roles. Integrated into the CI/CD pipeline to block deployments that introduce excessive permissions.

Skills & Technologies

Cloud Platforms
AWS, GCP, Azure
Security Tools
Wazuh, Splunk, Burp Suite, Nessus, Trivy
Infrastructure
Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux
Languages
Python, Go, Bash, HCL, SQL
IAM & Secrets
Vault, AWS IAM, Okta, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC
Compliance
SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001

Certifications

Education

M.S. Cybersecurity & Information Assurance
University of Washington
B.S. Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin