Syed Shareef

Amazon Web Services

Security advisor to a portfolio of AWS's largest customers

• Hyperscale cloud adoption: Removed the primary security blocker at one of AWS's largest strategic accounts. Showed how the AWS Nitro System's hardware-rooted security met their internal data-classification bar, which unlocked sensitive-data workloads on EC2 for the first time.
• AI security practice: Presented "Novice to MAESTRO," a session on threat modeling agentic AI systems, at BSides DFW 2025. Earlier, created a hands-on workshop on securing LLM applications with custom data; it was picked for AWS's 300-level field-enablement curriculum and taught twice in 2024.
• AI infrastructure security: Partnered with Meta on their end-to-end AWS security architecture (identity, network, and resource controls, plus secure AI clusters) and designed secure egress patterns for AI and HPC workloads; co-presented at re:Invent 2025 and re:Inforce 2025.
• Adaptive edge protection: Architected Twilio's adaptive protection on AWS WAF: rules generated just-in-time and deployed through a no-touch CI/CD pipeline, protecting 1.7+ trillion interactions a year across 306,000+ customers. Co-presented at re:Inforce 2024.
• Identity modernization: Cut long-lived IAM users by ~80% at a major social-media customer through migration to IAM Identity Center, and turned their feedback into service roadmap items.
• Multi-account governance: Guided Pinterest's transformation from a monolithic AWS account to a multi-account AWS Organization (AWS blog).
• DNS-first egress design: Designed Pinterest's layered egress controls: deny at the DNS resolver first, so blocked traffic never reaches Network Firewall inspection. Written up in two parts (part 1, part 2).

Amazon Web Services

Product-side security engineering: proactive controls that validate infrastructure before it deploys

• Policy-as-code at scale: Shipped 220+ production controls (preventive, proactive, detective) with a 3-engineer team, writing Python and extensive CloudFormation Guard DSL. Creator and security reviewer for the majority of the controls portfolio; carried production on-call.

Amazon Web Services

Security advisor to major financial services and enterprise customers

• Cloud perimeter protection: Reduced time to market by 3 months for an FSI customer's first app handling sensitive data in the cloud, through a layered perimeter control architecture based on threat modeling, using native and third-party security services.
• Cloud security posture transformation: Led a major FSI to consolidate on a single CSPM tool, decreasing remediation time by 40%, and helped deploy a managed centralized CSPM deployment that cut costs by 20%.
• Cloud-native vulnerability management: Cut a major financial exchange's patching time by 20-25% and tooling cost by 40% by replacing appliance-based scanning with cloud-native vulnerability management.
• High-risk workload migration: Enabled 6x faster migration of a major manufacturer's workloads classified as high-risk, through threat modeling and managed-container security controls.
• Product roadmap influence: Influenced the roadmaps of 18 AWS services by advocating strategic customers' security needs to service teams.
• Platform evangelization: Wrote AWS's most-read security blog of 2021, co-authored the AWS Log4Shell response guidance, and co-created the FSI Service Spotlight blog series that helps customers accelerate AWS service approval through a standardized compliance and security framework.

Slalom Consulting

Cloud security architect responsible for client delivery, proposals, new business opportunities, knowledge management

• DevSecOps transformation: Led a DevSecOps transformation for a global client: assessed the security needs of multiple DevOps teams, conducted POCs of pipeline security tools, and created roadmaps for deployment.
• Cloud security assessments: Ensured cloud-native applications under development were compliant with regulatory and business requirements and resilient to attacks; accelerated an application migration with a threat-model-driven S3 data-protection strategy and layered controls.

Citigroup

Technology & cyber risk advisor to supported business entities

• Privileged access reduction: Managed a program that reduced persistent privileged access by 8x across 12,000 users in Citigroup's end-user computing organization.
• Business unit security SME: Acted as cybersecurity partner for Citigroup's end-user computing engineering and operations groups, ensuring apps were developed to Secure SDLC principles and operated in alignment with company security policy.
• Risk manager: Managed technology & operational risk for the consumer banking division by liaising with first-line and audit groups; ensured security control alignment with the firm's risk appetite and compliance needs (GDPR, SOX, FFIEC).