AI Engineering · Security Leadership · Quantitative Systems
Engineering and technology leader with 20+ years building and operating production platforms, now focused on AI-augmented software engineering and real-time data infrastructure. Executive track record as a CTO and a CISO, leading multinational teams of 40+ and owning enterprise risk in regulated financial services; co-inventor of an internationally granted patent. Today I build and run KGB-ONE single-handedly — a billion-row real-time options analytics platform, developed with a self-designed multi-agent AI coding harness, and measured rather than assumed: on a fixed benchmark, the context and memory layer behind that harness is worth a 5x reduction in agent steps and an 11x reduction in cost per completed task.
Facet 01 · Skill
CISO/CTO background spanning two generations of WebTrust-certified public-key infrastructure — multi-layer CAs, registration authorities, LDAP, OCSP and HSM-integrated cryptography — deployed to government, banking and industrial clients across 30+ countries under annual WebTrust audit programmes. Later, as CISO and Data Protection Officer of a CHF 14bn+ wealth and asset manager across six jurisdictions, built and ran an information-security program (ISMS policy per ISO27001 / FINMA / SOC2 / DORA / GDPR), an IT-risk portfolio, IAM/IGA oversight, board and Risk-Committee reporting, incident response and third-party vendor risk, and served as Data Protection Officer.
Practices what he preaches on his own platforms: isolated read-only public services, least-privilege database roles, hardened containers (non-root, read-only rootfs), TLS/CSP discipline, firewall and fail2ban operations, and recurring security audits of his own internet-facing surfaces.
ISO27001, FINMA, DORA, SOC2, ISAE3402 and GDPR programs; 24×7 SOC/SIEM delivery ($1M+ programs); EPP / MDM / 2FA transitions; board and Risk-Committee reporting; Data Protection Officer.
Earlier career · 2001–2015
Two generations of WebTrust-certified public-key infrastructure — multi-layer CAs, registration authorities, LDAP, and OCSP — deployed to government, banking, and industrial clients across 30+ countries. HSM-integrated custom cryptography, smart-card platforms, and a granted patent for digital authentication of valuable goods. Secure data centres built to WebTrust and DoD Level 5 specifications; annual WebTrust audit programmes; EU EEMA PKI interoperability standards work.
Earlier career · 2001–2015
Secure credential and password-management platforms across web, desktop, and mobile — X.509 digital IDs, encrypted local stores, and biometric integration. Consumer social-network systems for major sports franchises with Facebook/Twitter APIs, content management, and fan push alerts. Smart-card authentication architectures; commercial certificate and subscription transaction portals. Cryptocurrency and blockchain identity infrastructure for digital-asset provenance and secure transactions.
Facet 02 · Skill
I treat agent performance as an engineering problem rather than a matter of taste. The harness is the hard part, not the model: heterogeneous vendor agent CLIs coordinating with no central orchestrator, through a shared verified context and a task queue, with per-task git-worktree isolation, a correctness gate before any work is accepted, scored task lineage under a beat-the-incumbent commit rule, and cost-disciplined routing across 30+ models and 8 providers. Agents carry lessons between runs, so a known-failed approach is not retried.
Multi-agent orchestration over a knowledge base of thousands of embedded research chunks with structured tool use, RAG and knowledge-graph pipelines, and tiered dispatch across multiple LLM providers. LLM-based document and report generation is gated by adversarial QA before publication. The stack learns from daily write-ups and past sessions via pgvector memory.
Agents that learn across tasks — each run distilled into a lesson and replayed to related work, so failures are not repeated. Evaluated the way infrastructure should be: fixed benchmarks, ablation studies and cost-per-completed-task measurement, with pgvector semantic search and GraphRAG retrieval underneath.
Facet 03 · Skill
Real-time market-microstructure infrastructure and a strategy-research engine, built and operated solo: 43 services in production, a 275 GB TimescaleDB holding 1.06 billion rows, and 421 reproducible backtest runs with full metadata. Dockerised microservices, real-time WebSocket ingestion, Redis distribution and a columnar-cache layer for bulk-replay research with walk-forward validation and prop-firm survival modeling — plus full infrastructure ownership: networking, firewalling, secure remote access, observability and automated alerting.
A real-time SPX options analytics and automated-reporting platform: per-minute dealer-exposure snapshots, filtered net-premium drift, regime detection, and gated end-of-day / pre-open / intraday report generation — surfaced through a React charting portal, with verification gates on every published figure.
Backtesting, a strategy registry and signal research (dealer-positioning, regime and ML families) with prop-firm survival simulation and reproducible, cached result sets for comparable evaluation.
DXLink / WebSocket ingestion, TimescaleDB hypertables, Redis Streams event bus, Dockerised microservices on Linux with systemd; FastAPI backends and React + Vite + Tailwind front ends with Plotly interactive charting.
Facet 04 · Skill
Defined-risk options strategies on SPX and index products, driven by dealer positioning and regime — carrying strong Calmar and Sortino ratios across forward testing and live management. The options analytics behind this work — full chain, historical and live, with millisecond-accurate real-time flow — come from a commercial provider. Live trading integration spans broker and execution APIs across Tastytrade, Schwab (thinkorswim), MooMoo (Futu OpenD API) and cTrader (prop-firm FIX / Open API + Protobuf).
Facet 05 · Skill
Swiss national (Geneva) · bilingual English / French. Executive MBA, Management of Technology, EPFL Lausanne (2010 — Prize for Best Grades, HEC/EPFL, and Best Business Plan award). BSc Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of the West Indies (1995, 1st in Major). PMP (2025), CISSP, ISSAP, ISSMP, CSSLP and Python developer certification. CEIBS Shanghai "Doing Business in China" certificate (2009). ISC2 exam-item review volunteer since 2005.
Earlier: UN/UNCTAD technical consultant (PKI design, Secure Electronic Commerce Authenticated Link project, 1997); Project Manager for the Science, Technology & Innovation Park phase I at TIDCO, Trinidad & Tobago (USD 30M+ budget, reported to ministerial cabinet). Volunteering: JCI Seniors Geneva, president (2+ years); MassChallenge Switzerland, program coordinator.
Open to developer evaluation programs, compute-grant collaborations, technical case studies, security and technical roles, consulting and speaker engagements.
Daily intelligence
The daily end-of-day market briefings — dealer-positioning, regime, flow and the levels that matter, fronted by $RAVOLM, a regime-aware animated volume visualisation — now live at blackmantrading.com.