About Me

Every role I have held — carpenter, designer, data centre manager, security architect — is the same job in different material. Study it, understand how it fails, build something that holds under stress. A dovetail joint and a firewall policy demand identical thinking: structure, load paths, failure modes. The material changes; the discipline does not.

I started as a carpenter in the mid-nineties — affordable housing in Brighton, then building film sets in Luxembourg for American Werewolf in Paris. Workshop construction from technical drawings, standby problem-solving on set. It taught me to work fast, work precisely, and think on my feet.

Between contracts I studied Interior Design at Ravensbourne while working part-time in the university's Network Operations Centre. Both disciplines asked the same question: how do you design something that accommodates change, handles load, and fails gracefully?

That part-time role grew into a decade of consulting across the UK. AAA infrastructure and OpenBSD firewall perimeters at Ravensbourne. Systems administration and disaster recovery at the Royal Veterinary College. Media production facility evaluations for BECTU. The thread was always the same: understand the system, find where it fails, fix the architecture — not the symptoms.

GoDaddy in Singapore — GNU/Linux systems across 4,500+ production servers. Incident response, platform abuse investigation with US federal law enforcement chain-of-custody, and the unglamorous reality of keeping services running. Within two years I was managing APAC data centre operations, leading a site expansion, and fixing a product change that had silently burned over a million dollars in capacity.

Then Facebook (later Meta) — leading the turn-up of their first APAC regional data centre. Five years as Site Manager, building a team from scratch in a region where Meta had no operational presence. I proposed and developed the Red Team Operations Global Programme: a partnership between Meta's internal Red Team and Infrastructure Operations across all global touchpoints — cable landing stations, PoPs, co-location facilities. That programme expanded to full data centre engagements, uncovering vulnerabilities that guided strategic growth into high-threat APAC locations.

From there into Infrastructure & Operations Security Engineering, then ERAD Operations — global non-volatile media handling, digital forensics process improvement, and incident response programme development.

At ExpressVPN I managed Operations Engineering before volunteering into counter-censorship — where security, networking, and geopolitics collide. I secured C-suite approval for a dedicated Information Security Research team across Hong Kong and the USA, reporting into the CISO. Measurable results: a two-year-old iOS client misconfiguration fixed, a TLS 1.3 obfuscation flaw discovered and resolved (sustained connectivity restored from zero to over two hours), time-to-connect reduced from 20 seconds to under 5 on desktop.

As Cybersecurity Architect at staff level, I co-established the formal Security Architecture function with the Principal Security Architect. Threat modelling, security control analysis, and the structural decisions about how services should be built. Not compliance theatre — architectural integrity: identifying gaps before they become incidents, building governance that engineering teams actually follow.

I run Knight Intelligence — an independent engineering practice building security operations platforms, AI-first operating systems, and DevSecOps automation. Self-hosted infrastructure from bare metal up.

The projects on this site are the public-facing side of that work. TeenTidal, pg-harden, FretNote — different problems, same approach: understand the domain deeply, build something that solves a real need, care about the details.