Brandon Adkins’ Career Journey - Taking Chances and Tackling New Challenges

Last updated at Fri, 18 Oct 2024 20:36:15 GMT

Brandon Adkins is the Manager of our Threat Intelligence & Detection Engineering (TIDE) team. His career journey spans a variety of roles and teams where he has been able to showcase his technical skills in security. Since joining Rapid7, he’s had experience as a Penetration Testing Consultant, working with both red and purple teams, and now as a leader with our TIDE team he supports engineers in writing effective detections for products like Insight IDR.

Adkins is no stranger to seeking out and taking on new technical challenges. Before joining Rapid7, he had built a long and successful career, achieving the role of Principal Information Security Analyst.

“I decided to come to Rapid7 because I was at a point in my career where in order to advance further, I was either going to be a people manager, or I would have to look elsewhere,” said Adkins. “At the time, I didn’t feel like I was ready to hang up my hat as an individual contributor. I still felt I had more to offer on the technical side, and didn’t want to be done yet.”

This drive led him to pursue his Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) designation, enabling him to become a Penetration Tester. “I got my notification that I had passed my test the day I had my first interview with Rapid7. So the fact that I got the job really shows how they were willing to take a risk on someone brand new, and invest in my career by giving me that chance.”

When asked what the biggest shift was in coming to Rapid7, he praises the quality and caliber of talent he was exposed to. “In my past role, I was used to being one of the smartest guys in the room. Coming into Rapid7 and seeing the depth of knowledge that is here on the team, and the level of expertise everyone brings, I very quickly realized that there was so much more for me to learn.”

Adkins was inspired by those around him, and his curiosity and desire to keep growing didn’t stay quiet for long. During his time, he moved from red teams to purple teams, and ultimately started to become curious about the detection engineering team who is responsible for ensuring our products are effectively able to identify suspicious behavior.

“I really enjoyed my time as a pen tester. I loved purple teaming because I got to work alongside our customer security teams and help them identify ways to improve.” This collaborative experience and being able to blend his experience from blue and red teaming sparked further curiosity in detection engineering.

“I reached out to a few people and thought my next move might be to join the team as an engineer. When we actually got to talking, it turns out what the team really needed at the time was a manager. I was hesitant at first, but the more that I thought about it the more I thought, ‘I think I can really help make a difference here and do something good.’”

Adkins’ extensive technical background combined with his ability to work collaboratively in a customer-facing capacity ended up being the combination of talent that was needed to help the team work more efficiently. “They already have great people writing code. What they needed, and what I hope to bring, is someone who can speak to the business and advocate for the team, to smooth out any speed bumps, and ultimately clear the way so they can do what they are best at”.

Since taking on his new role in January 2024, the team has grown to be three times the size it was originally. “It’s an exciting time to be part of the team because we are getting the support and investment from the business to continue to iterate and make our products even better.”

As he continues to hire new people into the business, and support existing employees in growing their careers, Adkins says there are two key factors he looks for to spot high-caliber talent - communication skills, and the ability to collaborate.  “Technical ability is obviously important, you have to be able to do the work. But beyond that, if we’re looking for someone to step into a more senior role on the team, or evaluate if someone is ready for a promotion, I want to see examples of how they can communicate their ideas and challenges effectively, and how they use the partnerships we have across the business to collaborate and find solutions.”

For the TIDE team, Rapid7’s engineers sit at the intersection of customer feedback, product management, and our security operations center. “At a certain point, we can’t do our jobs well without having a partnership with other teams. We need to know from the SOC team if something isn’t working the way it should be. We want to know from our customers and Customer Advisors what’s working well and what more they’d like to see, and we need to work alongside our product teams and analysts to understand and synthesize data to get a full picture of the customer attack surface.”

For Adkins, his journey in cybersecurity is one that has opened a number of different doors as he’s explored new roles and teams. His expertise and experience has helped support customers around the world in understanding their attack surface and more efficiently protecting their business from bad actors.

When asked what advice he would share for others looking to grow their career, he shared “When you get an opportunity to try something new - especially at Rapid7 - jump at it. Rapid7 hired me as a pen tester with zero pentest experience. Four years later, they took a risk on me again as a people leader with zero previous people leader experience. This is a place where these moves and opportunities are not only available, but are supported by the leadership around you. If you have the fundamental skills necessary and it’s something you're interested in, there’s a ton of room for you to expand your career.”