Open to opportunities

Yeswanth Chilakala

@yeswanthchilakala

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Cybersecurity Engineer building Zero Trust controls and SIEM detections to accelerate incident response.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a role where I can build and tune SOC detections, automate incident response playbooks, and deploy Zero Trust access controls—working in a continuous-monitoring culture that values detection-as-code and measurable risk reduction.

I’m a Cybersecurity Engineer with 3+ years of hands-on experience maturing Security Operations programs—engineering Zero Trust controls and driving incident response in cloud-native and enterprise environments. I focus on detection engineering, automation, and continuous monitoring using frameworks like NIST CSF and MITRE ATT&CK.

At American Express, I engineered SIEM detection content and automated playbooks that cut mean time to detect by 35%, while strengthening Zero Trust access controls with MFA, RBAC, and least privilege to eliminate unauthorized access incidents. I also owned the vulnerability management lifecycle with Nessus, cutting mean time to patch from 21 to 8 days and sustaining patch SLA at 94%. Beyond triage, I led incident response for account-compromise and credential-abuse cases and reduced similar incident recurrence by 70% through root-cause tracing to ATT&CK techniques.

Previously, as an Information Security Analyst, I reduced risk exposure by 60% through vulnerability assessments and hardened IAM for 200+ accounts, while monitoring traffic and supporting compliance documentation for audits. I bring a builder mindset to hands-on labs—turning attack-and-defense learnings into reusable playbooks and detection logic that improves analyst speed and security outcomes.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Cybersecurity Engineer

Current

American Express

Jan 2025 - Present (1 year 6 months)

Engineered and tuned SIEM detection content in Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel, authoring correlation rules and automated response playbooks mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and reducing mean time to detect by 35%. Led Zero Trust access controls, vulnerability management automation with Nessus, and incident response for account-compromise and credential-abuse cases.

Splunk SIEM detection engineering Zero Trust MFA RBAC PAM Least Privilege SSO Nessus Vulnerability Management CI CD SAST DAST Incident Response NIST RMF OWASP Top 10 NIST CSF PCI DSS GDPR

Information Security Analyst

AR Enterprises Pvt. Ltd.

Jun 2021 - Dec 2023 (2 years 6 months)

Conducted bi-annual vulnerability assessments across internal systems and web applications, mapping findings to OWASP Top 10 and MITRE ATT&CK and closing critical/high-severity issues. Rebuilt IAM controls for 200+ accounts and monitored network traffic to detect lateral movement indicators and support compliance documentation mapped to NIST CSF and ISO 27001.

Vulnerability Assessment Nmap OWASP ZAP OWASP Top 10 Vulnerability Management IAM RBAC Least Privilege PAM SPF DKIM DMARC Wireshark NIST CSF ISO 27001

Cybersecurity Intern

Verzeo

Jan 2022 - Mar 2022 (2 months)

Led a 6-person intern team through a 3-month cybersecurity project using Agile and Jira, training on OWASP Top 10 and threat modeling. Mentored teammates through deliverables and standardized how findings were documented and triaged for remediation guidance.

Agile Jira OWASP Top 10 Threat Modeling Security Training Vulnerability Assessment Documentation

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Pace University - Seidenberg School of CSIS

Master of Science (MS) in Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity

Grade: GPA: 3.94 / 4.0

Pursuing an MS in Cybersecurity with a GPA of 3.94/4.0. Coursework focuses on network security, ethical hacking, software risk management, malware analysis, and information security management.