I went from fixing hospital printers to building an AI that hunts hackers. What it caught at 3am made me shut my laptop 😳

Nobody tells you this about cybersecurity. A decade in healthcare IT, one career jump, and a 2-minute video I probably shouldn't be sharing.

People ask how someone goes from fixing printers in an emergency department to running engineering for a security operations centre. The honest answer is that I never really changed jobs. I just kept following the same problem into bigger rooms.

It started long before anyone paid me. From about 2004 I was the family's IT department: building PCs, overclocking things that probably shouldn't have been overclocked, and rescuing laptops. Some of you reading this were my first customers. I'm still on call, apparently.

The 7 career moves that got me here (#6 shocked my mum)

1. 2007 – 2012
   Volunteer everything

   Community radio stations (transmitters, live streaming, backups), a local media studio, then the IT at two primary schools: Active Directory, Hyper-V, imaging whole labs of machines.

2. 2013 – 2015
   Hospital IT, the deep end

   Applications specialist at a large NHS trust. Emergency department systems first, then radiology: PACS, RIS, dictation, and my first real taste of HL7 integration.

3. 2015
   On the road with the scanners

   Field engineer keeping medical imaging equipment alive in hospitals across the UK, mostly the Linux, Solaris and network side.

4. 2017 – 2020
   Clinical systems and infrastructure

   Clinical systems analyst and junior systems engineer at a national imaging provider. PACS expert, HL7 integration lead, patching, CAB, and the security audits that quietly changed my career.

5. 2020 – 2021
   Building the plumbing

   Software engineering on an NHS eHospital integration platform, then HL7 and DICOM integrations for a global teleradiology company.

6. 2021
   The jump into security

   Technical security consultant at a managed security provider. Incident response, 24/7 on-call, running analyst training and KQL workshops, and automating the MDR service wherever it would let me.

   😳 What actually happened on my first night on callI got a phone call at 2:47am and the first thing they said was
7. Now
   Head of Engineering

   Building an AI-assisted SOC platform on Azure.

The thread that runs through all of it

Healthcare IT is a lesson in translation. Every scanner, every lab system, every patient record speaks its own dialect, and HL7 messages are how they shout at each other. My job for years was catching those messages, making sense of them, and making sure the right thing happened next. Miss one and a scan doesn't reach a radiologist.

Security turned out to be exactly the same problem with higher stakes. Firewalls, endpoints, identity platforms and cloud logs all speak different languages too. The SOC's job is to catch those signals, make sense of them, and act before the damage is done.

Normalise everything. Get the data right first and every clever thing you build on top gets easier.

That was true for patient data and it's true for security telemetry. It's also, it turns out, the bit that makes AI genuinely useful rather than a gimmick.

Where AI comes in

A SOC analyst's day is mostly triage: reading an alert, pulling context from five different tools, deciding whether it matters. It's skilled work, but a lot of it is repetitive. I've spent enough nights on call to know how it feels at 3am.

So we're building a platform where every signal becomes a clean, consistent event, and an AI analyst works alongside the humans. It gathers the context, explains what it found and drafts a recommendation. The person stays firmly in charge of the decision.

Event-drivenNormalised dataHuman in the loopAzure

Easier to show than to explain. I wasn't going to post this, but here's what it flagged at 3am. Watch to the end:

What I've learned

You don't need to start in security to end up in security. Curiosity, a habit of asking "why did that happen?", and a stubborn streak count for more than any certificate.

And if you've ever had me fix your laptop over the phone on a Sunday: thank you. That was the apprenticeship.