# Derik Callahan

> Security leader working where security operations meets AI.

Senior Manager, IT Security — Security Engineering & Operations. Phoenix Metro, Arizona.

Focus: AI risk & agentic security; Cyber operations & threat management; Zero Trust, identity & SSE modernization.

## About

Player-coach security leader with 15 years in IT and cybersecurity, 7 of them managing security teams. I lead security engineering and operations for a publicly traded company.

Our 24/7 SOC runs through an MDR partnership at a mean time to detect under 5 minutes and a mean time to respond under 1 hour. We got there through detection engineering and SOAR automation, not added headcount.

I rebuilt that SOC around agentic AI. Production agents triage phishing, endpoint, and identity alerts, and an analyst reviews every incident with AI doing the enrichment and investigation legwork.

I sit on our AI Center of Excellence and architecture committee and lead safe AI adoption: use-case risk review, AI/MCP gateways, agent runtime guardrails, non-human identity controls, and OpenTelemetry tracing so the SOC can detect and investigate agent misuse.

## What the SOC is measured on

- < 5 min mean time to detect
- < 20 min triage
- < 1 hr mean time to respond

## How I lead

- Develop engineers rather than hire around gaps — grew interns into senior analysts and service desk staff into identity engineers.
- Set the operating plan and the metrics the program is measured on, and personally drive the critical initiatives and high-severity incidents.
- Report risk posture and program performance to senior leadership through KPI/KRI metrics and automated dashboards.
- Drive remediation through influence — partner with engineering and application owners so findings actually get fixed.
- Manage MDR, testing-firm, and platform vendor relationships against outcomes, not activity.

## Projects

- **HackerOne MCP server**: An MCP server covering the full HackerOne REST API (Customer and Hacker, 174 tools), over stdio or hosted Streamable HTTP, wrapped in a gated bug bounty operations pipeline where nothing leaves the machine without a recorded human approval. (https://derikcallahan.com/writing/three-gates-for-an-offensive-agent)
- **Identity governance browser agent**: A Python orchestrator that lets a model drive a browser through provisioning and deprovisioning in applications with no API, with Teams approval cards before every write and a SHA-256 hashed screenshot audit trail. (https://derikcallahan.com/writing/an-agent-for-apps-without-apis)
- **This site**: A static Astro site where every page has a Markdown twin, plus llms.txt, JSON Resume, content negotiation, and a read-only MCP endpoint — built so an AI agent can read it as easily as a person. (https://derikcallahan.com/writing/a-resume-for-two-audiences)

## Writing

- [A resume for two audiences](https://derikcallahan.com/writing/a-resume-for-two-audiences) (2026-10-16): More and more, the first reader of a resume is an AI agent. So I built this site to be read by both people and agents — Markdown twins, llms.txt, JSON Resume, content negotiation, and a small read-only MCP server.
- [The agent is an identity](https://derikcallahan.com/writing/the-agent-is-an-identity) (2026-10-07): Most AI risk conversations start with the model. I think they should start with the credentials. An agent can only do what its identity allows — so govern the identity.
- [Agent traces are security telemetry](https://derikcallahan.com/writing/agent-traces-are-security-telemetry) (2026-09-30): If you can't replay what an agent saw, decided, and did, you can't investigate it. OpenTelemetry already gives us the format. The SOC needs to treat it like EDR data.
- [An agent for apps without APIs](https://derikcallahan.com/writing/an-agent-for-apps-without-apis) (2026-09-12): Every identity program has a list of disconnected applications that someone provisions by hand. I built a proof of concept where a model drives the browser instead — with a human approving every write and a hashed screenshot behind every step.
- [Three gates for an offensive agent](https://derikcallahan.com/writing/three-gates-for-an-offensive-agent) (2026-08-22): I built an MCP server for HackerOne and a bug bounty pipeline around it. The interesting part isn't the 174 tools. It's the three places where the agent has to stop and wait for me.

## Contact

- Contact form: https://derikcallahan.com/contact
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derik-callahan
- GitHub: https://github.com/dcallahan
- Location: Phoenix Metro, Arizona

Full resume: https://derikcallahan.com/resume · Machine-readable: https://derikcallahan.com/resume.json · Agent guide: https://derikcallahan.com/agents