Project 03
Military Service & Technical Career
6 years of active RAF service — from initial training through cyber assurance at RAF Waddington, an operational deployment in the UAE, to network engineering in Cyprus. The technical and operational foundation behind everything else in this portfolio.
Overview
Before the MSc and before the production ML pipelines, there were six years in the RAF working on real infrastructure, real networks, and real security problems. Not simulated. Not academic. Operational environments where getting it wrong has consequences.
That background shapes everything I build now — the instinct to think about failure modes first, the habit of documenting decisions, and the ability to stay focused under pressure. The technical skills came from the job; the work ethic came earlier than that.
Career Timeline
01 Initial Training — Apr 2020 – Dec 2021
Recruit training followed by specialist trade training — the period that establishes the baseline: physical standards, military protocol, discipline, and the fundamentals of operating within a structured, high-accountability environment.
The habits formed here are not soft skills — they are operational requirements. Meeting deadlines, following procedure under stress, and understanding why standards exist (not just what they are) directly translates into engineering work. You don't cut corners in either context.
02 RAF Waddington — Cyber Assurance & IS — Dec 2021 – May 2025
Posted to RAF Waddington in a cyber assurance and information security role. Day-to-day work covered a broad spectrum: security compliance audits, assurance reporting, hardware and software rollouts, and supporting the information security posture of the station.
Responsible for evaluating systems against security baselines, identifying gaps, and working through the remediation process. Rollouts required coordinating across teams — deploying new hardware and software configurations to live systems while maintaining operational continuity.
03 Operational Deployment — UAE — Jun 2024 – Oct 2024
Four-month overseas deployment to the UAE. The primary technical remit was an information security overhaul — redesigning how sensitive data was managed and shared across the deployment using SharePoint, with a focus on role-based access control.
This meant mapping existing data flows, identifying access control gaps, and implementing a permissions structure that restricted information to those with the appropriate need and clearance. The kind of work that is easy to underestimate but operationally critical — a misconfigured permission in a deployed environment is not a dev environment mistake.
The deployment resulted in a formal Commendation Award from the British Armed Forces for outstanding performance — recognising the technical contribution and the standard of work delivered in a demanding operational setting.
04 Ayios Nikolaos, Cyprus — Network Engineer — May 2025 – Present
Current posting at Ayios Nikolaos, Cyprus, in a network engineering role. Responsible for the installation and maintenance of over 650 digital assets — a scale that demands systematic inventory management, fault-finding processes, and structured configuration control.
The role includes cloud involvement — working at the intersection of on-premise infrastructure and cloud-based services. Managing production-grade network infrastructure in an active operational environment is a different class of problem to lab work: uptime matters, changes have to be risk-assessed, and there is no "undo" on a live network.
What This Background Gives Me
Years of auditing systems, identifying weaknesses, and enforcing access control means security is not an afterthought in anything I build — it's the first question I ask. The network anomaly detector in Project 1 is a direct product of that instinct.
650+ managed assets in Cyprus, live software rollouts at RAF Waddington — I understand what production-grade infrastructure looks like and what it takes to keep it running. That context matters when designing systems that have to work beyond a development environment.
Military environments don't accept missed deadlines or undocumented decisions. Those standards carry directly into engineering work — structured thinking, clear documentation, and the composure to diagnose problems methodically when the pressure is on.
The UAE deployment required translating a security requirement into a technical implementation and then explaining it to non-technical stakeholders in an operational context. That gap between what needs to happen and how to make it happen is where most real-world engineering work lives.