Donovan Ellison

Cloud Security Engineer

Experience

Sep 2024 – present

Automated vulnerability intake and routing across 5+ sources, tracking 1,000+ findings in a centralized Jira board, syncing tickets to team boards, setting SLA due dates based on severity, and auto-closing 242 tickets after fixes or triage.
Built an AI vulnerability triage agent that assessed business risk and assigned owning teams, identifying 60% of 438 reviewed tickets as false positives over 6 months as quarterly intake rose ~13x; an approval gate held Jira and Semgrep writes until review.
Defined security requirements for Infrastructure's service-mesh and Gateway API migration for east-west mTLS; used gateway benchmark data to inform controller selection and contributed to Linkerd service-policy and Kgateway proofs of concept.
Owned the Rad Security runtime agent on 10 production and staging AWS EKS clusters, keeping Kubernetes threat detection and audit logging current through 12 merged Helm and Terraform PRs.
Built and operated an open-source threat modeling app on EKS and RDS with Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, and Okta OIDC; after an adoption review, moved the workflow to Notion, which supported 30+ threat models in its first year.
Responded to the November 2025 Shai-Hulud campaign by deploying a Semgrep rule to block indicator files on announcement day; after a retrospective, built a script to check Semgrep's dependency inventory against compromised-package lists, later using it during mini-Shai-Hulud and Axios campaigns.

Mar 2024 – Sep 2024

Optimized Terraform pipelines, decreasing approval and request processing times by over 80%, enhancing efficiency and usability for both approvers and requesters.
Partnered with engineering teams to deploy Renovate across 100+ repositories, automating dependency management. This proactive approach mitigated Critical and High vulnerabilities in over 50 production services, significantly enhancing security posture.
Facilitated the deployment of a self-service access portal, resulting in a 66% reduction in group request completion times and ensuring adherence to SOC II and HITRUST access controls.
Streamlined and optimized the setup and coordination of AWS and GCP pentests, reducing the overall setup time by 50%.

Jan 2022 – Mar 2024

As the inaugural Cloud Security Engineer, led security initiatives throughout a year-and-a-half long data center migration to GCP.
Orchestrated the deployment of DiscrimiNAT across 6 VPCs, filtering egress traffic in 27 environments with over 900 unique FQDNs allowlisted.
Developed a Python Flask app that enables developers to bypass the 24-hour SLA for FQDN additions by quickly creating temporary egress firewall rules in lower environments. This innovation saved thousands of engineering hours, allowing uninterrupted development and testing.
Introduced sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retrospective sessions, resulting in an outstanding 77% reduction in Lead Time for ticket completion, from an average of 61.3 days to just 13.8 days after 3 months.

Mar 2021 – Jan 2022

Enabled AWS Systems Manager for several dozen EC2 instances, providing secure remote command execution, automated patching, and granular access control to instances.
Architected an AWS solution for managing SSH keys on TeamCity agents across multiple AWS accounts, enhancing security and access management.
Analyzed and resolved an Elasticsearch cluster issue that caused day long logging outages, sometimes multiple times a week.
Spearheaded the refactoring of the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provisioning and configuration.
Developed a roadmap for Kubernetes improvements by evaluating different tools, researching best practices, creating proof of concepts, and meeting with key stakeholders.

Sep 2016 – Aug 2020

Technologies

Programming

Certifications