Natalie Somersall

🗺️ Washington, DC metro area

What does the future of AI-powered software development look like for the Defense Industrial Base? How do we secure it, from human to AI agent to delivery?

Lead an AI-powered cybersecurity solution as the first hire for the market. Mentor and ramp teammates from commercial sales into the Federal market.

Build Public Sector sales as the first engineer dedicated to the vertical. Ramp and mentor the team to over 50 people supporting public sector go-to-market, each with growing territories to drive tens of millions in revenue from greenfield.
Lead first-of-its-kind proof of concepts on complex migrations into containerized workloads, regulated artificial intelligence (AI) applications, promotion across air-gaps and other compliance boundaries as needed, and adoption of FIPS-validated cryptography.
Demonstrate business value of application security and software supply chain best practices to a myriad of regulatory frameworks and guidelines, now including NIST Secure Software Development Framework and Application Container Security Guide.
Executive briefings and thought leadership to support a rapidly-growing technology and audience.

Partner exclusively with the most security-conscious customers, guiding them on meeting their development and security needs within the entire GitHub Enterprise platform and integrations.
- Evaluating and securely deploying artificial intelligence (AI) across the development lifecycle, then assessing business and application security impacts
- Automating and building the infrastructure to support it safely
- Cultural changes of internal collaboration and rolling out application security programs
- Deployment and compliance planning (eg, CMMC, FedRAMP, ITAR) of enterprise software factories
Consistent quota attainment of over 150% every half.
Develop custom solutions such as human-friendly Kubernetes runners or managing an enterprise-wide security team across the largest GitHub customers.
Thought leadership, speaking and writing about developer problems within regulated industries, and customer advocacy within our Product and Engineering teams.
Mentorship throughout the solutions team to ensure continued career and sales growth.

Lead consolidation of developer tools within CMMC and ITAR compliance including:
- Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) management for enterprise-wide systems
- Application security tools to centralized reporting within Cybersecurity Team
- Source control to GitHub Enterprise Server (several thousand active users)
- CI/CD to GitHub Actions in on-premises bare-metal Kubernetes
- Custom audit reports, saving thousands of dollars per year on audits per consolidated system
- Drive adoption via migration, support, and community engagement
Develop a data lake for actionable business insights into developer productivity, tool adoption trends across several dozen sources, and talent planning.
Lead a team for Linux infrastructure operations for Cybersecurity and Incident Response supporting threat hunting, insider risk, penetration testing, incident response, and vulnerability management.
Develop infrastructure for exploratory AI/ML workloads with white-box GPUs and custom Linux kernel versions (similar to fedora-acs-override) for effective scheduling across tenants.
Create critical cross-team business processes for software development firm-wide.
- Open-source license risk assessment and mitigation
- Automated compliance auditing and alerting for developer tools
- Revamp the process to open-source internally developed software
Consolidate Global Hosting Services environments via Rundeck, vSphere, and SaltStack.

🛠️ Container Escapes 101 (August 2026), an interactive workshop at the AppSec Village at DEF CON 34. Let’s figure out if we’re in a container and try some escapes live! (link, writeup and demos)
🎙️ There I FIPS’d It - Misadventures in Federal Cryptography (January 2026) at DistrictCon 1. Cryptography seems deceptively simple until you get into implementation. It’s tempting to ship something “just good enough”. We’ll tour the most common footguns I find in the field with folks who are sure they’ve done it right, with live demos and example code. (link, slides with writeup)
🎙️ Signing and Verifying Multi-Architecture Containers with Sigstore (June 2025) at OpenSSF Community Day NA 2025. We’ll run through real-world weirdness managing multi-architecture images at scale, including how some registries and pull-through caches behave unexpectedly with other enterprise software. (slides with writeup, YouTube)

Related prior employment, references, and other information available upon request.

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