Dakota Nelson
Senior Security Engineer II at Etsy
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDakota Nelson is a Senior Security Engineer with 11 years of experience building offensive and defensive security programs and leading technical teams at organizations like Etsy, Shopify, and Leviathan Security Group. He combines deep hands-on pentesting and tooling experience—contributing backend and evasion-focused improvements to the well-known Empire post-exploitation framework—with program-level work creating internal threat modeling and pentest initiatives. Dakota has managed and mentored consulting teams of 20+, scoped large consulting engagements, and moved between individual contributor research roles and people leadership while maintaining active technical craft. Based in Seattle, he brings an engineer’s curiosity from early robotics and embedded research to practical application security at scale, pairing code-level fluency with operational security program design.
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 Mines
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (9)
exp10
pos10
python10
jinja210
security10
templating9
dropbox-api5
github-ci4
githubaction-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
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