Career Village: Hacked My Way Here: Real Stories into Security
Grady Lancaster, Ryan Makababad, Jason Lee, Mayas Karaga, Jifon Satpati
BSides Seattle 2026 · Day 1 · Track 2
This 56-minute career panel brings together four security operators at different career stages -- a principal security TPM at Microsoft, a retired multi-time CISO (Splunk, Zoom, Salesforce), a principal security engineer at T-Mobile, and a current CISO at Motive -- moderated by Grady Lancaster, who spent five years leading security recruitment at Twilio. The panel covers how each panelist broke into cybersecurity, what skills accelerated their careers, how to get promoted, and how to break into leadership.
AI review
A career advice panel with no technical security content whatsoever. The panelists have impressive backgrounds (CISO at Zoom/Splunk, Microsoft crypto, T-Mobile BAS) but the discussion stays entirely in the realm of career navigation, networking, and promotion strategies. Routing to the career track -- this has zero technical contribution.