Open to opportunities

Taylor Canada

Cybersecurity Engineer

Cybersecurity engineer with 7 years of experience spanning security engineering, data engineering, and automation. Specializes in designing, operating, and troubleshooting large-scale on-premises Elastic Stack environments supporting SIEM, operational monitoring, and incident investigation. Experienced with Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Elastic Agent, Fleet, Chef Infra, Python, Linux, GitLab CI/CD, TLS/PKI, data pipelines, web security, and email security.

Contact me Download résumé

01

About

I work on the operational technology side of cybersecurity, building solutions to secure, detect, and automate the tools it takes to run the magic of Walt Disney World. Most of my time is spent building the pipelines that move data and designing alerts to make that data meaningful. When I'm not managing the SIEM, I spend my time finding automation opportunities for our team and creating the solution for it. I have used Python and Ruby to automate tasks for Cyber Project Management, Vulnerability Management, and Certificate Enrollment.

  • FocusOT security engineering
  • Based inOrlando, FL
  • Working styleHands-on, automation-first
  • Currently learningChef Infra with CI/CD
  • AvailabilityOpen to conversations

02

Technical skills

Grouped by what I actually use in production, not what I've read about.

Detection & Monitoring

  • Elastic Stack
  • Logstash pipelines
  • SIEM tuning
  • Zabbix
  • MITRE ATT&CK for ICS

Automation & Scripting

  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Cortex XSOAR
  • REST API integration
  • CI pipelines
  • Chef Infra

Network & Infrastructure

  • Palo Alto NGFW
  • PKI / cert lifecycle
  • Linux administration
  • Secrets management

Enterprise Security

  • Tenable
  • Symantec Web Proxy
  • Proofpoint Email Security
  • Cortex XDR

Program & People

  • Security awareness
  • Runbook authoring
  • Cross-team enablement
  • Training

03

Experience

  1. 2024 — Present

    Cybersecurity Technical Specialist

    The Walt Disney Company · Orlando, FL

    • Built Chef Infra Cookbooks that reduced Logstash deployment time from 6 hours to 1 hour.
    • Designed and built certificate lifecycle automation to rollout to 4k+ endpoints allowing attraction engineers to deploy devices days faster.
    • Matured the Elastic Stack by planning and implementing a major version upgrade and redesigning indices to be data streams which drove storage utilization down by 30%.
    • Elastic
    • Python
    • Automation

  2. 2021-2024

    Information Security Engineer

    USAA · San Antonio, TX

    • Contributed to the migration of the on-prem Proofpoint email security stack to the cloud.
    • Created and maintained security audit controls, governance documentation, and operational procedures
    • Gathered and presented evidence that supported compliance to regulatory controls to both internal and external auditors.
    • Completed hundreds of requests for web and email traffic issues.
    • Led the rollout of Symantec's browser isolation which allowed the financial crimes team to safely navigate riskier websites for investigations.
    • Email
    • Networking
    • Controls

  3. 2019-2021

    Data Engineer

    USAA · San Antonio, TX

    • Led a team initiative to migrate source-code repositories to GitLab and adopt GitLab CI/CD deployment processes.
    • Developed Python and SQL applications that extracted, transformed, and loaded large datasets from Netezza databases.

04

Selected work

logstash deployment Production

Automated Logstash Deployment

Due to the nature of the network segmentation, Logstash deployment happened frequently and each manual deploy was different than the last. I automated the deployment using Gitlab and Chef Automate to deploy a logstash device in under an hour instead of the 4-6 hours it took previously. This also solved the issue of configuration drift that was seen among Logstash devices.

  • Logstash
  • Elastic
  • Ruby

Read the write-up

project management Internal Tool

Automated Project Spend Tracking

Built an internal tool for estimating and tracking project involvement for the Cyber team. The tool accepts SAP exports for labor and spend and maps them to an attraction project to compare to the estimated figures. The team's project managers were doing this manually previously with various spreadsheets.

  • Project Management
  • Automation
  • Python
certificate lifecycle Production

Certificate Lifecycle Automation

Automated issuance and renewal against an internal PKI, eliminating a recurring outages caused by silently expiring certificates. Built in Chef Automate to allow for easy deployment to devices that were already using Chef to deploy.

  • PKI
  • Ruby
  • REST APIs
vuln reporting Internal tool

Risk-Based Vulnerability Reporting

Rebuilt vulnerability reporting around exploitability and asset criticality instead of raw CVSS, giving site teams a remediation list short enough to actually finish.

  • Tenable API
  • Python
  • Data modeling
spirit box Personal Project

Replica of Phasmophobia's Spirit Box

Built a working replica of a spirit box from the video game Phasmophobia complete with voice recognition and sounds from the game.

  • Hardware
  • Engineering
  • Electronics
bsides badge Personal Project

Bsides Hardware Badge 2024

Designed and built the hardware badge for Bsides San Antonio 2024. One hundred badges were sold as an upgrade to the conference ticket and all profits went to Bsides SATX.

  • Volunteer
  • PCB Design
  • Electronics

05

Certifications & education

Elastic Certified Analyst badge Elastic Certified Analyst Elastic · 2026 Verify GIAC Response and Industrial Defense (GRID) GIAC Response and Industrial Defense (GRID) GIAC · 2024 Verify GIAC Python Coder (GPYC) GIAC Python Coder (GPYC) GIAC · 2023 Verify GIAC Critical Controls Certification (GCCC) GIAC Critical Controls Certification (GCCC) GIAC · 2023 Verify GIAC Web Application Penetration Tester (GWAPT) GIAC Web Application Penetration Tester (GWAPT) GIAC · 2021 Verify
UTSA Bachelor of Business Administration, Cyber Security and Information Systems University of Texas San Antonio · 2019

06

Let's talk

I'm interested in continuing my growth in data and security engineering roles where automation and detection quality matter. If that's what you're hiring for, I'd like to hear about it.

taylorjcanada@gmail.com