Radu Ciuca

I'm a cyber security engineer with eight years' enterprise experience, most recently at BT where I spent six years designing and delivering security solutions for customers.

That covered the full delivery lifecycle: evaluating products against a requirement, designing the solution, building and configuring it, testing every feature against what the vendor claimed, and writing the High and Low Level Designs that took it into production. I worked extensively across the Palo Alto Networks portfolio — Panorama for centralised firewall management, Strata Cloud Manager, PAN-OS Next Generation Firewalls, Prisma SASE, Enterprise DLP, ADEM and XSOAR — alongside Fortinet FortiGate and FortiManager, Cisco Firepower, Netskope, McAfee CASB, and Okta and Duo for identity. I hold Palo Alto SASE TITAN and ADEM TITAN certifications, and Fortinet NSE3 and FortiConverter.

I also owned our test lab: a VMware vSphere environment with Windows and Linux servers, Active Directory, DNS and DHCP, virtual and bare-metal firewalls, routers and traffic generators. When other teams came to depend on it, I introduced ITIL-aligned change, incident and access management so it ran as shared infrastructure rather than my personal environment.

A few things I'm particularly pleased with. I built a product evaluation framework logging every test — expected result, actual result, evidence, tester, software version — with visual reporting so non-technical colleagues could act on technical findings directly. It became the team's standard process. I led a Zero Touch Provisioning project end to end as sole engineer. And I found an access control weakness where permissions had grown over-permissioned with no matrix linking job role to entitlement; I implemented single sign-on, built a role-to-entitlement matrix and established a joiners, movers and leavers process. The environment then passed BT's internal penetration testing.

I automate repeatable work. When manual testing proved slow and inconsistent, I scripted our traffic generation and virtual routing tools so results were reproducible.

My career started in hands-on support — nine years at Apple's Genius Bar diagnosing hardware and software faults face to face, still the best training in explaining technical things clearly that I've had. I joined BT on a graduate networking scheme, designing temporary mobile coverage for events and managing firmware on in-building 4G equipment.

I have a First Class honours degree in Computer Systems and Networking and am studying towards ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity. Outside work I keep a home lab, run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign as Dungeon Master, and coach Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. What I'm looking for: hands-on technical work in network security, cloud security or infrastructure engineering, building and solving problems rather than pure governance. I'm near Chepstow, 20 minutes from Bristol, and happy with remote, hybrid or travel to customer sites.