About

Who I Am

I’m Zachary Brooks, a Senior Network Security Engineer at NVIDIA working within the Global Network Infrastructure department under the NGC organization. I build security infrastructure to support AI workloads at scale, develop infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD automation, implement DevSecOps practices, and contribute to observability platforms across NVIDIA’s cloud environments. I’ve been involved in site builds for H100 and GB200 deployments and have built tooling and pipelines that are used as reference implementations across multiple NGC teams.

Background

My career started in network security at Rackspace, working with firewalls and application delivery controllers. The scripting involved in ADC platforms was my first real exposure to software development. I also got into cloud early at Rackspace as a subject matter expert for Rackconnect, bridging dedicated environments into the Rackspace Cloud. From there I moved into public cloud and spent the rest of my career moving between cloud engineering, security, and application delivery — taking on a leadership role at Dun & Bradstreet and a senior technical role at H-E-B before joining NVIDIA.

I’ve always enjoyed coding, particularly in Python. My path into software engineering was non-traditional — it started with simple scripting, grew through automation, and eventually became a core part of what I do every day. Shout out to Talk Python to Me for being a constant source of learning along the way.

I hold a Master’s in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance and a Bachelor’s in IT (Security Emphasis), both from Western Governors University. Early in my career I pursued certifications heavily as a way to expand my knowledge — at one point holding 27 across networking, cloud, and security. Most have since expired, but notable ones included the CCNP Routing and Switching, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, multiple Google Cloud Professional certifications (Cloud Architect, Network Engineer, Data Engineer), the F5-CSE Cloud, Certified Ethical Hacker, and LPIC-1. I’m currently working through the NVIDIA certification program, starting with the NVIDIA-Certified Associate in AI Infrastructure and Operations.

Interests

My current specialization is high-performance networking and infrastructure, but I have a strong interest in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and the places where these fields intersect. These are topics I intend to explore more deeply on this site over time.

AI Safety and Guardrails

One area I’m particularly focused on is AI safety — specifically the testing and validation of agentic AI systems. There’s a growing trend in the AI community to dismiss established engineering practices like DevSecOps, software QA, and application security as “legacy” thinking. I find this reckless. Much of the code being produced — particularly in open-source AI communities — would be dangerous if deployed to production without the same rigor we’d apply to any other software system.

AI is not slowing down, and I want to contribute to building a safer, more responsible ecosystem around it. I plan to spend time researching and learning what I can about AI guardrails, testing methodologies, and the broader challenge of making these systems trustworthy — and documenting what I find along the way.

About This Site

Misguided Engineering is where I document what I learn and share what I find useful. Some of it takes the form of structured documentation, some of it becomes blog posts, and all of it reflects genuine curiosity about how systems work.