---
title: "U Debasish R. - Senior Security Engineer in Odisha | Tal"
description: "Meet U Debasish R., Building Secure Financial APIs & Infrastructure | AppSec · WAF · Detection Engineering | Senior Security Engineer @ Decentro based in Odisha. AI stack includes claude code, claude, and gemini. Explore public work links including hackervault.tech."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/u-debasish-rao/share-image"
---

# U Debasish R\. on Tal

## Headline

Building Secure Financial APIs & Infrastructure \| AppSec · WAF · Detection Engineering \| Senior Security Engineer @ Decentro

## About

I build security systems at a scale most engineers never encounter\. At PhonePe, I protect 700M\+ user transactions across a distributed fintech platform handling billions of events daily\. That means engineering WAF rule sets across Cloudflare, Akamai, and F5 that cut malicious traffic by 45%, architecting a 500\-rule detection layer on Elastic Stack that reduced alert noise by 30%, and shipping an in\-house WAF on Pingora and Coraza that improved bot fingerprinting accuracy by 48% — all in production, all at scale\. But the work I'm most proud of is Barbican — a production AI security orchestration platform I designed from scratch\. It exposes SOC tooling as LLM\-callable functions via a FastAPI\-based MCP server, uses vector embeddings \(all\-MiniLM sentence\-transformers\) with FAISS cosine similarity indexing for semantic alert deduplication, and cuts L1/L2 mean\-time\-to\-investigate by \~60%\. It's what AI\-augmented security actually looks like in production, not in a demo\. Before PhonePe, I spent two years at Loginsoft doing deep vulnerability research for Cisco, Juniper, and McAfee — discovering 70\+ critical vulnerabilities through Java source code reviews, authoring 6,000\+ OVAL rules and custom YARA signatures, and contributing to CVE\-credited patches shipped to enterprise customers worldwide\. My expertise sits at the intersection of WAF engineering, detection engineering, cloud security, and AI\-augmented defense\. I work across AWS, GCP, and Azure, and I'm comfortable operating from raw packet analysis and TLS fingerprinting all the way up to compliance frameworks like PCI\-DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC2\. I write about WAF engineering, detection logic, and AI in security at hackervault\.tech\. If you're working on hard security problems at scale — or building the next generation of AI\-native security tooling — I'd love to connect\.

## Location

Odisha

## AI stack

claude code

claude

gemini

github copilot

n8n

notebooklm

## Work experience

Senior Security Engineer at Decentro, Jul 2026 \- Present · 4 mos, Bengaluru

Senior Infosec Engineer at PhonePe, Jul 2025 \- Jun 2026 · 1 yr, India, Protecting 500M\+ user transactions across PhonePe's distributed fintech platform\. 1\.WAF Strategy & Rule Engineering: Engineered sophisticated rule sets across Cloudflare, Akamai, and F5 ASM/AFM, achieving a 45%\+ reduction in malicious traffic and significantly lowering false\-positive rates for production APIs\. Performed continuous threat modeling and defense\-in\-depth tuning to block OWASP Top 10, bot, and zero\-day threats\. 2\.In\-House WAF Development: Architected and shipped a proprietary WAF leveraging Nginx Ingress Controller, Pingora, and Coraza with custom iRules\-style logic; achieved a 48% improvement in bot fingerprinting accuracy and hardened the PhonePe CDN against layer\-7 attacks\. Deployed in Docker containers with automated CI/CD rollout\. 3\.AI\-Augmented Alert Investigation: Designed and deployed Barbican — a production MCP \(Model Context Protocol\) server built on FastAPI — to expose security tools as LLM\-callable functions for AI\-assisted WAF alert investigation\. Integrated vector embedding pipeline \(all\-MiniLM sentence\-transformers\) with FAISS cosine similarity indexing to enable semantic deduplication and intelligent alert clustering across millions of daily events, cutting L1/L2 mean\-time\-to\-investigate by \~60%\. 4\.SOC Architecture & Detection Engineering: Designed an Elastic Stack\-based SOC with SOAR\-integrated playbooks that reduced alert noise by 30% and correlation time by 40%; integrated ML\-based anomaly scoring to surface high\-confidence threats from billions of daily log events\. 5\.Zero Trust & API Security: Established hardened API gateways and edge controls aligned with Zero Trust and defense\-in\-depth principles; enforced mTLS, rate limiting, and bot\-scoring at the perimeter for all critical payment endpoints\. 6\.Performance & Scalability: Optimized WAF rule precedence and evaluation order, improving processing throughput under peak load without degrading latency SLAs\.

Infosec engineer at PhonePe, Jul 2023 \- Aug 2025 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Bangalore, 1\.SOC Architecture & Stack Design: Served as architect of PhonePe's Security Operations Centre — designed and owned the full detection stack: Elastic Stack \(ELK\) as the core SIEM, Opensearch for log search and analytics, Wazuh for host\-based detection and FIM, QRadar for enterprise correlation, Logstash and Rsyslog for log ingestion/normalisation, Filebeat and Vector as lightweight shippers, and SOAR playbooks for automated response — handling billions of events per day at 99\.99% pipeline availability across 12,000\+ systems\. 2\.High\-Fidelity Detection Rules: Developed 500\+ detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK tactics across network, endpoint, and application layers; authored custom Sigma and YARA rules enabling the SOC team to identify attack patterns previously invisible to existing tooling\. 3\.SIEM Ingestion Pipeline Rebuild: Rebuilt the ELK \+ Opensearch ingestion pipeline to normalise log schemas from 20\+ source systems \(Wazuh agents, Filebeat, Rsyslog, Vector\) enabling consistent cross\-source correlation and real\-time SOC dashboarding\. 4\.Compliance Automation & Drift Detection: Automated patch compliance workflows for 12,000\+ systems using Python, Go, and Terraform; delivered hardened OS baselines \(RHEL/Ubuntu, Windows\) with CIS Benchmarks and implemented drift detection to auto\-revert unauthorized configuration changes — improving measurable compliance posture by 60%\. 5\.Vulnerability Management: Owned the end\-to\-end vulnerability lifecycle — triaged findings from Nessus/Qualys scans, prioritized remediation based on threat intelligence, and ensured critical CVEs were resolved within defined SLAs across 12,000\+ systems\. 6\.JA4/JA4H Bot Detection: Built a TLS fingerprinting pipeline using JA4 and JA4H signatures that reduced automated abuse attempts on payment APIs by 45% while maintaining zero friction for legitimate users\.

software engineer\-security researcher at Loginsoft, Aug 2021 \- Jul 2023 · 2 yrs, Hyderabad, Enterprise vulnerability research for Cisco, Juniper, McAfee and other Tier\-1 vendors\. 1\.Vulnerability Research \(Cisco, Juniper, McAfee\): Discovered 70\+ critical vulnerabilities through deep Java source code reviews and binary analysis; findings directly resulted in CVE\-credited patches shipped to enterprise customers worldwide\. 2\.VAPT & DAST Tooling: Conducted structured penetration tests using Burp Suite Professional, OWASP ZAP, nmap, and Nikto for web app and network security assessments; identified exploitable attack chains in network device firmware and application layers across enterprise products\. 3\.YARA & OVAL Rule Development: Authored 6,000\+ OVAL rules and purpose\-built YARA signatures for malware classification and firmware threat detection; developed custom SecLang detection logic for automated scanning of proprietary binary formats against known vulnerability patterns\. 4\.Workflow Automation: Built Python and Go tooling to automate policy and compliance workflows, cutting manual analyst effort by 60% and enabling consistent, scalable vulnerability triage across multiple client engagements\.

Founder at Mitigater Techsecure Pvt\. Ltd\., Jun 2020 \- Aug 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos, India, Co\-founded a security services and training company delivering cybersecurity education, assessments, and secure development solutions\. Highlights: > Delivered hands\-on training for CEH, Security\+, CCNA, Linux, helping students launch cybersecurity careers\. > Secured client web\-server infrastructures using ModSecurity, DDOS Deflate, Rootkit Hunter, and custom hardening scripts\. > Built full\-stack web applications \(PHP, Python\) and integrated secure CI/CD pipelines\. > Provided end\-to\-end consulting on server security, malware protection, and controlled network architecture\.

Professional Trainer at Golars Networks, Nov 2019 \- Mar 2020 · 5 mos, Hyderabad, Delivered advanced cybersecurity, networking, and cloud training programs for students and corporate clients\. Key Responsibilities: > Trained in CEH, ECSA, CISA, including hands\-on ethical hacking labs\. > Conducted networking training on routing, switching, firewalls, and AWS cloud basics\. > Delivered Linux administration training, including server security, permissions, and user management\.

## Education

Bachelor of Technology \- BTech, Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering Technology/Technician, Gandhi Institute of Technological Advancements \(GITA\), Bhubaneswar

hse, Saraswati sishu vidya mandir \- bhubaneswar

## Public links

- hackervault\.tech: https://hackervault\.tech/

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/u-debasish-rao)

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