Infrastructure and security, run on real hardware.
Infrastructure and security engineer. Run a 38-service production platform across VLAN-segmented networks, ZFS storage, GPU passthrough, and zero-trust mesh. NSF I-Corps Entrepreneurial Lead. IEEE SmartNets 2024 author.
- Services on the box
- 38
- Customer interviews
- 100+
- Containers / VMs
- 38 / 4
- Years self-hosting
- 2+
Work
Four roles, ongoing. The first is interview-led customer discovery; the rest are solo systems I run, build, or operate.
- 01
Entrepreneurial Lead, National Science Foundation I-Corps
Apr 2024 - Nov 2024 · New York, NY
- Ran 100+ customer-discovery interviews with industry and academic stakeholders as the team's principal interviewer, alongside a co-EL, under faculty PI (P. Ghazizadeh) and one industry mentor. Completed both Regional and National Teams cohorts.
- Conducted problem-solution fit validation for decentralized edge computing in vehicular cloud environments; findings drove the team's pivot to a vehicular-cloud market focus.
- Co-authored peer-reviewed IEEE SmartNets 2024 paper with faculty PI P. Ghazizadeh.
- 02
Solo Systems and Network Operator, Production Infrastructure Platform
2024 - Present · Self-hosted
- Run a production self-hosted platform (i5-12400, RTX 3050, 64 GB, 11 TB) hosting 38 containerized services across Nextcloud, Matrix, and local LLM inference. Segmented by VLAN and exposed through Caddy with TLS across six public domains. IOMMU GPU passthrough for Ollama LLMs, four KVM/QEMU VMs, Tailscale mesh, Prometheus/Grafana observability.
- Operate a personal and tenant stack that replaced third-party SaaS for primary users. Managed migrations from Google Drive, Slack, and Dropbox with zero downtime over two-week cutovers.
- Migrate the platform stack between bare-metal and VM substrates as system needs evolve. Current configuration runs NixOS on bare-metal with ZFS mirrors, GPU passthrough for LLM inference, and a Tailscale zero-trust mesh.
- 03
Solo Builder, Relay (Self-Hosted Live Streaming)
2024 - Present · Self-hosted
- Built a Go-based self-hosted SRT live-streaming server with HLS transcoding, live chat (rate-limited and moderated), and admin panel. Single binary, no database, multi-arch Docker image auto-built via GitHub Actions.
- Designed for OBS-over-SRT ingest with separate camera feed port for producer monitoring. Adaptive-quality output (1080p / 720p / 480p / 360p) via FFmpeg.
- 04
Operator and Configurator, Autonomous Agent Runtime (Hermes-based)
2024 - Present · Self-hosted
- Deployed and operate a Hermes Agent (Nous Research) instance across Discord, Telegram, and iMessage (Photon). Built a 25+ tool MCP layer (Firecrawl, SearXNG, Playwright, smart-home) with execution-approval policies and webhook ingress.
- Authored nightly cron and LLM-Wiki skill that auto-folds session output into an Obsidian vault synced to iPhone via Syncthing. Around 50 pages maintained across chat, web, and mobile surfaces.
Publication
Singh, B., Ghazizadeh, P., Choudhury, P., and Ebrahimi, A. (2024). Assessing Cooperative Trust-Based Authentication within Micro Vehicular Clouds. IEEE SmartNets 2024.
Read on IEEE Xplore
Stack
The things I reach for daily. The order is roughly: Linux on the box, Go or Python for new services, NixOS where the system has to survive a cutover.
Infrastructure and Networking
Linux server administration (NixOS, Ubuntu Server, Fedora), VLAN segmentation, TCP/IP networking (L2/L3 fundamentals, routing, firewalling), WireGuard, Tailscale (zero-trust mesh), Caddy (reverse proxy + TLS), Nginx, DNS, DHCP, network monitoring.
Systems and Virtualization
KVM/QEMU virtualization, GPU passthrough (IOMMU/VFIO), Docker, Docker Compose, ZFS storage, systemd, journald, GNS3 lab, bare-metal provisioning.
Observability and Operations
Prometheus, Grafana, Wireshark, log analysis, incident response patterns, capacity planning, migration cutovers (multi-week, zero-downtime).
Security
Network security architecture, threat modeling, deny-list and allow-list patterns, secure-by-default configuration, MCP tool-call security, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, cryptography fundamentals, digital forensics, reverse engineering.
Scripting
Go, Python, Bash, Kotlin, TypeScript, SQL, C/C++ (NDK).
Education
M.S., Cyber & Information Security
2023 - 2025St. John's University · New York, NY
GPA 4.0 / 4.0
NSA- and ABET-accredited program. Coursework: Network Security, Cryptography, Digital Forensics, Secure Software Engineering.
B.S., Computer Science (Cyber Security Systems)
2018 - 2022St. John's University · New York, NY
GPA 3.32 / 4.0