Dakota Nelson
Senior Security Engineer II at Etsy
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDakota Nelson is a Senior Security Engineer II based in Seattle with 10 years of experience building offensive and defensive security programs for product teams and consultancies. At Etsy they are developing an internal threat modeling and pentesting program, and previously led application security at Shopify and managed a ~20-person consulting team at Leviathan Security Group, blending hands-on technical work with people and process leadership. Dakota’s background spans pentesting, security research, and software development—contributions to the well-known Empire post‑exploitation framework (improving plugin architecture and stager templating) highlight deep offensive tooling expertise. Early internships and engineering roles, from DARPA data-visualization work to embedded CubeSat projects, provide a pragmatic engineering mindset that helps translate complex threats into auditable controls. Known for mentoring remote teams and operationalizing security at scale, Dakota brings a rare mix of developer rigor and red-team insight to product security.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Stevens High SchoolBachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Franklin W. Olin College of EngineeringComputer Engineering, Computer Engineering at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
security10
exp10
pos10
python10
jinja210
templating9
dropbox-api5
github-ci4
github-actions-workflows4
github-actions-workflow4
github-action-workflow4
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
EmpireProject/Empire
Oct 2017 - Feb 2018
Empire is a PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent.
Role in this project:
Backend & Security Engineer
Backend & Security EngineerContributions:21 commits, 11 PRs, 1 branch in 3 months
Contributions summary:Dakota primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Empire post-exploitation agent. Their work includes adding plugin functionality, refactoring plugin loading, and integrating a templating engine to support stager generation, particularly for HTTP and Dropbox stagers. They also removed shared code from the python stager and refactored the code to include the system information gathering. These changes suggest a focus on improving the tool's modularity, flexibility, and evasion capabilities.
empirepythonagentpowershellpost-exploitation
DakotaNelson/Empire
Oct 2017 - Mar 2018
Contributions:39 pushes, 19 branches in 5 months
empirepythonagentpowershellpost-exploitation
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.