QA Team Lead & Security Assurance Engineer | AI Risk Strategist | Nairobi, Kenya

I operate at the intersection of software quality assurance, adversarial threat emulation, and emerging AI risk governance. Currently leading QA strategy and serving as an AI & Risk Ambassador at CYBER RANGES, alongside consulting on security monitoring and platform integration at Silensec Africa.

My engineering philosophy is simple: find the systemic cause, eliminate the defect class at the root, and build the automated guardrails to keep it fixed. Whether architecting defense-grade acceptance frameworks (ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3), governing zero-trust RBAC for 10,000+ users, or modeling prompt-injection threats against production systems, I design resilient systems that hold up under real-world operational pressure.

• Security Assurance & Shift-Left QA: Leading test architecture for cybersecurity platforms serving 200+ global enterprise and defense clients. Championing early design reviews, API contract validation, and zero-defect deployment pipelines.

• AI Risk & Governance: Architecting the department's first end-to-end AI risk intelligence pipeline—translating frontline adversarial scenarios (prompt robustness, hallucination boundaries, data poisoning) into actionable GRC mitigation roadmaps.

• Access Governance & Threat Operations: Enforcing least-privilege RBAC across 50+ environments with zero unauthorized access incidents over 18+ months; tuning SIEM detection logic (Splunk, ELK) to suppress alert fatigue and accelerate SOC triage.

• Adversarial Emulation & Testing: Developing and validating complex boot2root scenarios and threat emulation modules aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

• flatJSON2csv — Lightweight client-side tool to flatten and convert structured/nested JSON data into tabular CSV format for rapid log triage, API validation, and data analysis.

• Custom Cloud WAF & Threat Engine (AWS + YARA) — Built a customizable Web Application Firewall combining custom YARA inspection rules and AWS IAM APIs, achieving a 98% true-positive rate against structured attack corpora (KamiLimu Innovation Project Winner).

• IoT Intrusion Detection System (IDS) — Designed and tested lightweight network intrusion detection nodes tailored for embedded device clusters (94% attack classification accuracy).

• 🌐 ITU Global CyberDrill: Spearheaded comprehensive QA validation for the flagship Dubai cyberdrill exercise, powering threat training across 140 countries.

• 🎯 Defense-Grade Acceptance Testing: Authored modular test suites and formal verification cards adhering to ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3 for sovereign on-premises cyber ranges deployments.

• ⚡ SOC Efficiency & Risk Mitigation: Automated User Access Management (UAM) reviews in Python (cutting review cycles from 17 days to 13 business hours) and identified privilege-revocation exposure windows, neutralizing significant enterprise risk.

• 🧠 Responsible AI Workshops: Mentored 30+ peer engineers in partnership with Mozilla Foundation advocacy programs, demonstrating hands-on evaluation for AI bias, prompt injection, and hallucination bounds.

• ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) — Certified Tester (March 2026)

• LPIC-1 Linux Administrator — Linux Professional Institute

• Huntress CTF 2025 — Completed 60+ challenges spanning live malware analysis and offensive/defensive tradecraft

• MITRE ATT&CK Fundamentals & Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

• 🏁 Scuderia Ferrari Tifosi: Lifelong Formula 1 and Ferrari enthusiast tracking telemetry, aero upgrades, and Sunday race strategies. Forza Ferrari!

• 🇰🇪 Community & Mentorship: Proudly based in Nairobi, Kenya. Passionate about mentoring the next generation of African cyber researchers and QA test engineers through initiatives like KamiLimu.

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/teddymwai

• GitHub: github.com/teddymwai

• Portfolio / CV: Notion Space

Hakuna Matata!