18+ years of experience

Aaron Balcerzak

Cybersecurity Cloud Engineer

Experienced cloud engineer specializing in building cloud infrastructure, leading cloud security programs, and developing production web applications across several industries including financial services, healthcare, travel & hospitality, and technology.

View Experience Get in Touch
Aaron Balcerzak
What I do

Areas of Expertise

☁️

Cloud Engineering & Architecture

Designing and operating multi-account, multi-region cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP — migrations, landing zones, well-architected frameworks, and FinOps.

AWS Azure GCP EKS Terraform CloudFormation
🔐

Cybersecurity Engineering

Cloud security posture management, CNAPP, DSPM, zero-trust networking, vulnerability management, threat detection, and code-to-cloud pipeline security.

CNAPP DSPM CSPM Zero Trust SIEM SAST/DAST
🌐

Web Development

Full-stack web applications, CMS platforms, and enterprise web infrastructure. Production support across 60+ applications and lead developer on high-profile marketing sites.

HTML5 CSS3 JavaScript C# REST IIS / Apache
Career history

Professional Experience

Senior Vice President, Distinguished Cybersecurity Cloud Engineer M&T Bank Sep 2024 – Present
  • Technical lead on the development and implementation of a custom cloud control framework based on CSA CCM.
  • Drove rollout of additional CNAPP capabilities in partnership with multiple teams, owners, and stakeholders.
  • Led initiative to replace existing CNAPP tooling with a modernized approach to the overall program.
  • Technical lead for establishing a DSPM program and evaluating DSPM tooling.
  • Developed security goals for code-to-cloud pipelines; performed gap analysis and built a remediation roadmap.
  • Partnered with application security to modernize SAST, DAST, SCA, and SCT tooling and skillsets.
  • Participated in architecture reviews and multiple governance councils.
Staff Engineer, Security Operations ACV Auctions Nov 2020 – Sep 2024
  • Architected, designed, and implemented security controls within AWS/GCP cloud environments and Kubernetes/Docker workloads.
  • Built and maintained a logging pipeline using Fluentd, AWS Kinesis, and S3 to feed multiple SIEM tools.
  • Integrated container, host, SAST, and DAST scanning into Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
  • Built out a complete vulnerability remediation pipeline, workflow, and process for engineering teams.
  • Led the planning, architecture, and deployment of a Zscaler ZPA zero-trust network access solution replacing OpenVPN.
  • Configured SecOps infrastructure using Terraform; provided guidance across application security, IAM, 3rd-party risk, and threat detection.
Cloud Enterprise Architect BlueCross BlueShield of WNY Oct 2017 – Oct 2020
  • Defined and communicated cloud strategy across all areas of technology and the business.
  • Built and executed against a multi-year cloud migration roadmap.
  • Designed and maintained a multi-account AWS environment following the Well-Architected Framework.
  • Architected and productionalized a HIPAA-compliant enterprise Kubernetes deployment on AWS EKS.
  • Led a cross-functional Cloud Center of Excellence scrum team and mentored architects, engineers, and analysts.
  • Advisor to an internal innovation lab; created and led an internal speaker series on emerging technology.
Cloud Engineer Delaware North Companies Sep 2013 – Oct 2017
  • Key resource on a major project migrating 90+ applications and 90%+ of corporate data center to AWS in 4 months.
  • Architected a highly available web environment using EC2, ELB, Auto Scaling, Route53, RDS, and CloudFront via CloudFormation/Troposphere.
  • Assisted in the architecture and development of a multi-account, multi-region, multi-VPC version-controlled cloud network written in Python.
  • Developed and maintained cloud governance and disaster recovery tools in Python on Lambda via Serverless Framework.
  • Developed custom Python-based monitors for Datadog.
Web Developer Delaware North Companies May 2009 – Sep 2013
  • Lead developer on 15+ marketing websites for Yellowstone, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Sequoia, and other parks, casinos, and venues — built from PSDs in CMS using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and C#.
  • Primary production support resource for all web infrastructure and 60+ web applications.
PeopleSoft Developer Delaware North Companies Jul 2007 – May 2009
Designed, developed, tested, and documented solutions using PeopleTools and SQR scripts for HR, Finance, and Field Systems users.
Technical toolkit

Skills & Technologies

Cloud Platforms

AWS Azure GCP

Cloud Security

Wiz Lacework Prisma Cyera GuardDuty Microsoft Defender Snyk Veracode Invicti CrowdStrike SentinelOne Zscaler ZPA Panther Splunk Apiiro Legit

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform CloudFormation AWS CDK Serverless Framework

Containers & Orchestration

Kubernetes EKS AKS GKE OpenShift Docker Istio ArgoCD Flux

CI/CD

GitHub GitLab Jenkins CodePipeline Bamboo

Scripting & Languages

Python JavaScript Bash PowerShell C# Swift SQL Java

Observability & Ops

Datadog CloudWatch Dynatrace PagerDuty Jira Confluence ServiceNow

Web

HTML5 CSS3 REST IIS Apache Sitecore WordPress TLS/SSL

Config Management

Ansible Chef

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect
Academic background

Education

🎓

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science — Math Minor

St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY  ·  2003 – 2007

Get in touch

Let's Connect

I'm always open to discussing new opportunities, collaborations, or just connecting with fellow professionals in the industry. Feel free to reach out via email or connect with me on LinkedIn or GitHub.

Email LinkedIn GitHub