Manuel Gutierrez Hernandez

What drives me is owning the full lifecycle of a system: laying the security foundations at design time and ensuring production is stable and efficient for everyone who operates it. Over the past year and a half, I’ve put this into practice by migrating a production SOC from bare metal to Kubernetes with a Zero Trust architecture, cutting the attack surface by 85% and leaving zero ports exposed to the internet.

At ClickDefense S.L., I design, harden, and operate the cloud infrastructure of a SOC platform, including a migration to EKS multi-AZ with Zero Trust (segmented VPC, VPN-only access, internal NLB). I deliver faster, safer releases through Terraform and Ansible-driven Infrastructure as Code, autoscaling with Karpenter and KEDA, and Shift Left Security in GitLab CI/CD using SAST and Trivy on every merge request with secrets lifecycle management. With GitOps via ArgoCD, granular RBAC, and Kubernetes Network Policies, I’ve reduced MTTR with sub-3-minute rollbacks and built an observability stack using Prometheus and Grafana integrated with the SIEM platform.

Beyond day-to-day operations, I build security tooling in Go and Python that I run in real environments. I designed and built anchor, an open source, self-hosted vault alternative to HashiCorp Vault featuring AES-256-GCM encryption and zero-knowledge SSH, plus SPA-style protection using WireGuard with Single Packet Authorization. I’m looking for a team where I can take direct technical ownership of the platform and the architecture decisions.