Secunetics Loop

Joe Carroll

Interactive In-Person Interview Preparation Guide & Session Navigator

Junior-to-Mid Virtualization & Security Systems Engineer
Wednesday Morning Loop
~2.5 Hours (1 Hour Technical Component)

Candidate Profile Dashboard

Current Residence Lutherville Timonium, MD (Baltimore)
Relocation Plan Gaithersburg, MD or Tyson's Corner, VA
Academic Baseline AAS in Cyber Security
Technical Focus Proxmox Clustering & Agentic AI Security
Personal Details & Milestones
IT Legacy: Mentored by IT Director Father
Skateboard Instructor for Boy Scouts
Seasoned D&D Dungeon Master
Plays classic Day of Defeat with friends

Professional Trajectory

AAS Degree & Course Tutoring Graduation
Completed an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) in Cyber Security. In his final semester, he was selected to assist in teaching an AI course in Cyber Security due to his advanced work.
Assistant Senior Systems Architect GD Edge AI
Thrown directly into the fire at a 5-person startup. Served as the sole network engineer, designing, purchasing recommendations, and deploying their physical on-premises Proxmox hypervisor cluster from scratch.
Compliance Coordinator GD Edge AI
Autonomously managed and submitted documentation for CMMC Level 1 cyber-compliance and assisted on SOC 2 Type II operational reviews.

Sandboxes & Tech Hobbies

PowerEdge Home Lab Rack

Joe operates a massive, enterprise-grade rack in his home, including:

  • Two Dell PowerEdge R710 servers
  • One Dell PowerEdge R610 server
  • Direct iSCSI shared storage array between the servers
  • Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU dedicated to local model inference
  • Catalyst 2950 switch with custom VLAN tagging and Pi-hole DNS
  • Kubernetes cluster hosting a Minecraft server ("100% overkill but never goes offline")

Proxmox VE iSCSI SAN Kubernetes Nvidia 5090 Cisco IOS Forgejo (Git)
"I hear your friends run on a Minecraft server backed by a Kubernetes cluster and an iSCSI array. Did you ever expect to run gaming sessions on enterprise virtualized infrastructure, and what has been the trickiest part of handling storage replication across those R710 nodes?" Why it works: Validates his deep systems configuration efforts and opens discussions on shared storage, clustering, and local network topologies.
Agentic RE Ghidra Pipeline

Developed an automated reverse-engineering workflow that coordinates specialized sub-agents to analyze binary code.

  • Orchestrates agents using LangChain Python and PyTorch.
  • Interfaces directly with Ghidra (NSA's reverse engineering framework) to automate decompilation.
  • Fine-tunes Gemma models locally on custom Kaggle/GitHub vulnerability datasets.
  • Identified a concurrent token-bleed bug in Llama.cpp, forcing a migration of their orchestration stack to VLLM.

LangChain PyTorch Ghidra API Gemma Fine-Tuning VLLM Llama.cpp
"The token-combining prompt-bleed bug in Llama.cpp sounds like a massive security headache when running multiple user sessions. How did you diagnose that user stream crossing, and how was the transition to VLLM?" Why it works: Shows deep knowledge of local LLM orchestration and evaluates his system-level troubleshooting and dependency maintenance skills.
Cyber Watchdog & SISA Parser

Built a self-hosted pipeline named "AI Cyber Watchdog" that automates vulnerability tracking and impact assessment:

  • Monitors CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities RSS feeds continuously.
  • Invokes an uncensored local model ("White Rabbit Neo") to analyze exploit definitions.
  • Cross-references security advisories with an internal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to auto-detect vulnerable software running in their active infrastructure stack.
  • Auto-generates localized security alerts and containment recommendations.

White Rabbit Neo CISA RSS API CMDB Integration Docker DevSecOps
"Deploying a physical data center from the ground up as a junior engineer at a 5-person startup is incredible. When you were configuring Spanning Tree and VLAN tagging on those switches, what was the most unexpected bridging loop or configuration hurdle you ran into?" Why it works: Assesses whether his network configuration knowledge matches the practical, physical realities of complex topologies (like Secunetics' core consulting tasks).

Interview Checklist

Interview Session Notes

Session notes saved successfully!