UncommonX

Collaborative. In a 40-person organization like ours, every teammate's output feeds directly into another's success. I chose "collaborative" because no siloed effort can thrive here — each engagement requires seamless handoffs across security operations, incident response, development, infrastructure and leadership.

For example, in January 2025, one of our customers suffered an unauthorized intrusion. Our SOC analysts detected the anomaly and escalated it to incident response. Leadership immediately marshaled resources, then development built bespoke dashboards to visualize the attacker's behavior.

Meanwhile, infrastructure opened up new log sources to feed real-time telemetry into those dashboards. Within hours, we pinpointed the adversary's lateral movements, contained the breach and prevented a ransom payment. Every function leaned in — sharing data, refining queries and validating fixes — to restore our customer's security posture.

This cross-functional synergy not only thwarted the attack but also underscored how collaboration is the engine that keeps our wheels turning.

I've been with UncommonX for over three years. When I joined, I focused primarily on individual incident investigations — triaging alerts, chasing logs and escalating when needed. Today, I'm driving the evolution of our detection logic, architecting compound queries that automatically chain detection steps and surface high-fidelity alerts.

This journey has stretched me beyond pure technical execution into strategic thinking and mentorship. I learned to be comfortable with the uncomfortable — juggling a dozen simultaneous topics, from email authentication workflows to advanced threat hunting.

I now lead cross-departmental collaborations, translating frontline incident insights into production features for our development and infrastructure teams. And I coach junior analysts, empowering them to answer the fundamental question — "Is this malicious or benign?

" — without always escalating to senior staff. Through continuous hands-on projects and collective problem-solving, I've accelerated my technical depth in security orchestration and my soft skills in leadership and communication — transforming me from a reactive responder into a proactive architect of our platform's future.

A strong culture of learning is critical to the success of any firm. Learning covers both external knowledge and internal knowledge. Externally, large language models are transforming the IT industry and almost every industry, while development frameworks are constantly being updated, new vulnerabilities and exploits are surfacing, and we've seen revolutionary technologies like bitcoin arise.

Internally, as each department adapts to the shifting market forces, there must be knowledge-sharing throughout the organization to keep everyone pulling in the same direction and delighting customers. Here at UncommonX, we work to embed a culture of learning into everything we do.

Employees are encouraged to attend vendor events and take advantage of any networking opportunities available, and specific courses and certifications are covered by the company. Quarterly, we meet as a full company where there are four to five 30-minute demos of current products and technologies being worked on and/or emerging technologies being researched.

Also, as a team, we review each prospect engagement, either successful or unsuccessful, for areas where we can improve and learn from our missteps.

The biggest impact that a culture of learning has on employees is that they feel they are progressing in their career. We want our employees to view UncommonX as a place where they can grow and evolve. We look for confident, self-motivated individuals who are committed to a career of continuous learning.

This has led to us having a very low rate of employee attrition. Our learning culture allows us to continually deploy products using the latest cutting-edge technologies. Gathering feedback from customer engagements allows us to see shifts in the market and continue to develop and deploy solutions that our customers desire.

Communication is critical. Leaders need to have open and collaborative dialogue with their employees to understand their career goals and articulate the culture of the team and company. Leaders need to be willing to allow employees a percentage of their time to attend training, events or just exploring something new.

Junior employees should feel empowered to share knowledge with their more experienced peers. It is also important that employees are given some room to fail. Not every new endeavor will be a success.

But whether it's a success or failure, there can always be lessons learned and fed back in the continuous improvement loop.

The best thing about working at UncommonX is the flexibility to pursue any project I'm interested in. There are no restrictions on self-learning, unlike other organizations where you need to go through multiple layers of approval before initiating anything for the organization.