dawid-esterhuizen

desterhuizen [--cloud-governance] [--aws] [--appsec]
             [--exploit-dev] [--red-team] [--tooling]

desterhuizen --based netherlands --tz CET --since 2006

I set the cloud and security governance that MongoDB's Professional Services organisation runs on. I also hold OSCE³, OSCP and OSDA — so I know how the controls I write fail under attack.

Most security leaders inherit their threat model. I built mine: two years pentesting MongoDB's own internal tools white-box and black-box, and two years on the Synack Red Team. I write and release my own tooling — exploit development and ROP scripts, payload generation, and a provisioning framework for reproducible penetration testing workstations.

Before this: twenty years building the systems I now secure. Game backends at Arooga and SEGA Europe, and primary AWS administrator on every estate I have run since 2013.

I also hold an MBA. Mostly it is useful for one thing — explaining to the people who control budgets why a finding matters, in their language rather than mine.

1. 2026 —

   Distinguished Consulting Engineer

   MongoDB

   Technical direction for Professional Services cloud infrastructure, security posture and enablement across the organisation.

2. 2024 – 26

   Principal Service Delivery Enablement Engineer

   MongoDB

   Took ownership of cloud infrastructure for the whole Professional Services department — creating, enforcing and monitoring cloud policy, and building the tooling behind it.

3. 2023 – 25

   Red Team Member

   Synack Red Team

   Targeted penetration tests within Synack's engagement scopes, using standard tooling and custom tools I wrote. Discretionary time; not primary employment.

4. 2022 – 24

   Information Security Engineer II

   MongoDB

   White-box and black-box pentests of internally developed tools and products. Started a monthly offensive hackathon and built most of the challenges; carried L1 incidents on the on-call rota.

5. 2014 – 18

   Senior Server Engineer

   SEGA Europe

   Backend for Kingdom Conquest 3, primary AWS administrator for the studio estate, and a high-throughput analytics pipeline for future titles.

6. 2013 – 14

   Director of Server Technology

   Arooga

   Owned server technology across IaaS estates — including the auto-scaling behind Robocraft, built to scale down without users noticing.

Opinions here are my own, not my employer's.