Adan Álvarez

About

I've spent more than 15 years in tech and security, and I've sat in almost every seat.

  • Principal Security Architect & Researcher
  • Barcelona & Poland
  • AWS Community Builder
  • OSCP

I started out keeping Linux and VoIP servers alive. Then I spent years as a pentester, breaking into systems for a living. After that, I joined a digital mental health company as its first full-time security engineer. When the data you protect is about people's mental health, you learn fast that security is really about trust.

Today I'm Principal Security Architect & Researcher at A2SECURE. Every company is changing because of AI, and security has to change with it. My main job is supporting our security engineering and operations team, from the SOC to the engineers who build our defenses. I help them work better and faster, whether that means rethinking a process, automating it or building a new tool for it. I use AI where it really helps (not everything needs an agent), so people spend less time on repetitive work and more on what matters for our clients.

I also help with architecture decisions and cloud security, mostly on AWS.

On the research side, I study how attackers operate in AWS, and more and more how they use AI. I share what I find, data and code included, and my work has been featured in tl;dr sec, Detection Engineering Weekly and CloudSecList.

I live in Barcelona but spend a lot of time in Poland, so you'll find me in one or the other, or driving somewhere in between.

Portrait of Adan Álvarez

Career

From keeping servers alive to making security AI-ready

  1. 2025 – now

    Principal Security Architect & Researcher

    A2SECURE

    Supporting the security engineering and operations team: automating security processes with AI where it really helps, building internal security products such as deception and automation platforms, and researching AI-powered adversaries. Led the SOC’s move from an analyst-driven model to a highly automated operation.

  2. 2023 – 2025

    Principal Cybersecurity Engineer

    Koa Health

    Owned product security for a mental health SaaS, built detection engineering with detection-as-code, kept the company audit-ready for HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR, and secured the launch of two acquired applications.

  3. 2021 – 2023

    DevSecOps Engineer, first full-time security engineer

    Koa Health

    Built the technical security foundation from scratch: centralized logging and monitoring, AWS-native security, CI/CD hardening, threat modeling, and OWASP SAMM and DSOMM roadmaps.

  4. 2017 – 2021

    Pentester, then Lead Cyber Security Engineer

    A2SECURE

    Penetration tests, PCI-DSS, web and mobile audits and social engineering for clients across industries. Then led the technical team, adding AWS security, MITRE ATT&CK-based detections, adversary simulation and incident response playbooks.

  5. 2010 – 2017

    VoIP Technician, then Linux Sysadmin

    VozTelecom

    Kept the VoIP platform and its services running: deployments, automation, backups and recovery from failures.

Credentials

Certifications, community and research

Certifications

  • Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)
  • AWS Certified Security – Specialty
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • Foundations of Purple Teaming
Verify on Credly

Community

  • AWS Community Builder
  • 22 features in security newsletters, including tl;dr sec and Detection Engineering Weekly
  • Open-source tools such as TrailDiscover, TrailAlerts and HoneyTrail
See the projects

Vulnerabilities reported

Education

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
  • Higher Technician in Network Systems Management, IES Sabadell

Let's talk

If you're figuring out how to approach security in your company, or what AI means for it, I'm always happy to chat.

Message me on LinkedIn