Craig Thacker

I studied computer networking at university and followed it with a postgrad in information security - in hindsight, a fairly direct route to where I've ended up. The career since has moved through DevOps and platform engineering, into data platforms and MLOps, and now into security engineering, each layer building on the one before rather than replacing it.

At the core I'm a software engineer who specialises in platform and cloud - the kind that writes the code, builds the pipelines, and owns the infrastructure underneath. Azure is my primary environment, with AWS and hybrid setups alongside it. I've worked across platform engineering, CI/CD, data platforms, AKS and EKS, and engineering leadership before landing where I am now.

Currently I'm leading on Microsoft Defender and cloud security engineering - CSPM, endpoint protection, and SIEM integration. The automation that keeps environments compliant and observable at scale is just platform engineering applied to security, and that suits me well. You can't do security well on a platform you don't understand end to end.

I work mainly in Python, PowerShell, and Bash day-to-day, and I'm actively learning Go, C#, and TypeScript - this site is part of that, built with Next.js. MLOps sits at an interesting intersection of most of the things I've worked on and I keep coming back to it.