Sean Mahood

Software Architect / Senior Developer

Profile

Security focused software developer with 15 years of experience delivering secure, high-performance systems. Deep expertise in networking and embedded environments, applied cryptography, threat modeling, and secure-by-design architectures for both resource-constrained and scalable distributed systems.

Technical

  • Go, Python, C, C++
  • Threat Modeling
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Vulnerability Management
  • X.509 / HSM / PKI
  • PKI Design & Lifecycle Mgmt.
  • AWS / Cloud Infrastructures
  • Kubernetes / IaC
  • Packet / Network Analysis
  • Linux / FreeBSD
  • Kernel Dev / Debug
  • Code Review Governance

Skills

Technical Leadership

Extensive experience providing guidance and recommendations on technological best practices and innovations.

Design and Architecture

Track record of successfully implementing design projects with a focus on security, ease of maintenance, and extensibility.

Security

Deep understanding and affinity for cryptographically secure software and systems, working with a variety of data models and unique industry requirements.

Embedded Platform

Documented achievements with integrating complex technologies into both generic and custom embedded operating systems.

Experience

Arctic Wolf Networks

Software Architect - Asset Data Services

Technical Lead - Managed Risk Scanner

2018 - 2025

Primary architect for net-new hyper-scale service to track asset and security telemetry. Authored blueprint, data models, data flows, and high-level design documents.

Drove project readiness approvals through governance, ensuring design completeness, execution readiness, and understanding of risks.

Reviewed component designs, identified and remediated subtle design issues, and advocated for customer outcomes.

Headed technical and architectural ownership of vulnerability scanner product (multi-million ARR). Developed and mentored team. Authored core components.

Led product modularization initiative, defining boundaries and aligning stakeholders to reduce release risk, enable parallel development, and simplify maintenance.

Spearheaded incident responses and delivered live and postmortem vulnerability and risk assessments to minimize business impact.

Designed and implemented client-side per-unit PKI registration, secure data models, and secure transition mechanisms.

Participated in corporate PKI governance and advised on embedded appliance strategy and requirements.

Prototyped high-accuracy network scanning engine to bypass network filtering, intrusion detection systems (IDS), packet loss, and inconsistent routing configurations.

Sandvine

Senior Software Engineer - Platform Team

2011 - 2017

Maintained and improved custom Intel NIC drivers, including proprietary high performance networking stack on FreeBSD.

Diagnosed and proposed resolution for firmware corruption on prototype Intel NICs originating from hardware design flaw.

Implemented RASUM (Intel proprietary TCO register data) monitoring for Sandy Bridge and Haswell CPU architectures.

Improved tooling relating to kernel crash, memory leak, deadlock, and livelock debugging.

Performed code review moderation to ensure compliance with rigorous code review standards, including bug injection analysis to discover procedural failures.

Etymonic Design / AudioScan

Software Developer - Contractor

2010 - 2011

Scotiabank

Security Researcher - Contractor

2009 - 2010

Education

University of Waterloo - Waterloo, Canada

BASc in Computer Engineering

Sean Mahood — cv@sean.mahood.xyz — +1-647-895-1469