About Adam
Twenty-five years turning noisy security telemetry into clean, actionable protection.
Most recently I led the data, edge, and application-analysis engineering organizations at Zimperium, where I was responsible for how threat telemetry flowed through the company and how it became protection our customers could act on. Before Zimperium I spent eighteen years at a single team that was acquired four times — CipherTrust to Secure Computing to McAfee to Intel and back out to McAfee — and was promoted from L3 Support through Principal Engineer, Data Architect, and Research Architect along the way.
The work has always sat at the intersection of three things: large-scale data pipelines, machine-learning classifiers that have to hold up in production, and communicating what threat actors are actually doing to customers, executives, government agencies, and the press. I've been quoted in hundreds of interviews and features, keynoted anti-abuse conferences, taught training courses, chaired principal-engineering committees, and served as an FBI escalation contact.
I hold two U.S. patents on machine-learning techniques for network-security telemetry and I'm a Georgia Tech CS graduate. I currently live in Lilburn, GA.
Eighteen years, one team, five nameplates
2003 – 2021The middle stretch of my career looks like five employers if you skim it, but it was one continuous team that got acquired four times. I stayed and got promoted through each transition.
-
L3 SupportCipherTrustjoined 2003
-
Special AgentSecure ComputingCipherTrust acquired, 2006; later renamed “Principal Engineer” after HR asked for a title they understood
-
Principal EngineerMcAfeeSecure Computing acquired, 2008
-
Data ArchitectIntel SecurityMcAfee acquired, 2011
-
Research ArchitectMcAfeespun back out, 2017
Two U.S. patents, the 7-year PR steering-team seat, the FBI escalation contact role, the M3AAWG contributions, and most of the press coverage all came out of this stretch. Zimperium (2021–2026) is where I moved into org leadership and mobile threat intelligence.
Highlights
- Steady climb over 25+ years in the security ecosystem: from L3 Support through Principal Engineer, Data Architect, and Research Architect, to Principal Data Architect.
- Two granted U.S. patents on network-security machine learning (see /adam/patents/).
- Leadership and management have been a constant — from organizing cross-team working groups as an L3 support engineer, through Principal Engineer at McAfee, to running the Data, Edge, and Application Analysis engineering organizations at Zimperium and chairing its Principal Engineering Committee.
- Personally responsible for ~30M IP and ~200K domain reputation blocks per year at Intel/McAfee, driven by dedicated threat-hunting rather than passive feeds.
- 7 years on the McAfee Public Relations steering team; hundreds of press placements across blogs, threat reports, magazine interviews, podcasts, and TV.
- 13+ conference presentations and 2 keynote talks on future-threat prediction; 4 conference training courses delivered.
- FBI escalation contact; M3AAWG GDPR working-group contributor.
- Led full messaging datacenter uplift from physical Rackspace to virtualized Oracle.
Roles at a glance
Principal Data Architect (Zimperium, 2021–2026) · Research Architect / Data Architect / Principal Engineer / Special Agent / L3 Support (McAfee → Intel → McAfee → Secure Computing → CipherTrust, 2003–2021, one continuous team through four acquisitions) · Founding engineer (employee #3) at Reflex Security · Web Developer at CNN (during college).
What I'm looking for
A leadership role that revolves around sifting data for threats, building pipelines for the data those investigations run on, and working with highly motivated individual team members. I care about the whole loop — from raw telemetry, through the classifiers and reputation systems that turn it into protection, to the customer-facing story that explains why it matters.