TONY ROSSI · POULSBO, WASHINGTON · BUILDER OF SYSTEMS FOR PEOPLE THE SYSTEMS GAVE UP ON
Twenty-one years of service. A stack of ventures. One conviction: if the system is cruel, build a better system.
SCROLL — IF YOU MEAN IT
WHO I AM
I am not the resume. Neither are you.
Twenty-one years in the U.S. Navy. I retired as a Senior Chief in 2023 and walked into a hiring machine that reads people in six seconds and calls it efficiency. It filtered out better people than me every single day. I decided that was unacceptable, and then I decided that deciding wasn't enough.
So now I build. A hiring platform that treats candidates like humans. A nonprofit that teaches kids to defend themselves online. Compliance you can prove any day of the year. Infrastructure for the DIY music scene. None of it waiting for permission. All of it shipped by hand from a small town on the Kitsap Peninsula.
Cynicism is surrender wearing a smirk. I don't surrender.
LEVELD — CO-FOUNDER & CEO
The hiring industry compresses a human life into two pages of Calibri, lets an algorithm reject it in six seconds, and calls the silence afterward "process."
That's not a bug. That's a value system. leveld is the refusal — a candidate intelligence platform built so respect isn't a feature flag, it's the architecture.
You are not inventory.
You are not a keyword density score.
You decide who sees your name. You. No one else.
THE sIQURITY FOUNDATION — FOUNDER & CEO · 501(c)(3)
Every kid inherits the threat landscape. Almost none of them get handed the tools. The ones in underserved communities get handed nothing at all.
The sIQurity Foundation exists to close that gap with real curriculum, real hands, real outcomes — cybersecurity education for the communities the industry never bothers to visit. Not a career-day slideshow. A pipeline.
PILLAR I
Project-based cybersecurity education spanning 5th through 12th grade, piloted in the classroom — competency-based, hands-on, built to pull families in instead of shutting them out.
PILLAR II
Adult training that leads somewhere — a NIST CSF bootcamp and a full learning platform built to move people from locked-out to hired.
PILLAR III
Free and low-cost security help — assessments, awareness training — for the nonprofits, schools, and small organizations that attackers count on being defenseless.
THE REST OF THE CATALOG
Liner notes for the other fights. Each one started the same way: something was broken, nobody owned it, so I did.
FOUNDER / BUILDER
Infrastructure for the whole indie/DIY scene — artists, club owners, show bookers, fans. Cheap ticketing that doesn't gouge the door. Ticket sales that split themselves the second they clear, so nobody chases the money after load-out. Tour planning and real data analytics for people who've been running on gut and a spreadsheet.
The majors built their machine. This is ours — every hand that holds a scene up, on one platform.
FOUNDER / BUILDER
Continuous auditing for compliance programs. The annual audit is theater — a snapshot everyone rehearses for and forgets by Monday. attesting makes compliance a live signal instead: evidence collected continuously, posture you can attest to any day of the year, not just the one the auditor's in the building.
If your controls only hold when someone's watching, they were never controls.
FOUNDER / BUILDER
A modular cybersecurity platform that fuses live threat intelligence with real-world operator experience to pinpoint an organization's actual posture — not the one on the slide deck. One source of truth, two altitudes: the same data that fires an alert to the SOC analyst writes the report to the CISO. No translation layer, no telephone game.
Built on a world-model approach — inspired by Yann LeCun's work — because a defense that can't model its own environment is just a louder alarm.
THE PATH
The history in plain type. No mythology required.
SERVICE
U.S. NAVY
2002–2023
Twenty-one years. Retired Senior Chief. Built security programs where failure wasn't an abstraction.
CREDENTIALS
CISSP / CISM
Certified, current, and earned the long way — in production, not in theory.
SCHOLARSHIP
PHD CANDIDATE
Cyber Leadership, Capitol Technology University. Because the work deserves rigor, not just conviction.
GROUND
POULSBO, WA
Small town, Kitsap Peninsula. Everything above gets built here, by hand.
CONTACT
If you're building something honest, I want to hear about it. If you're hiring people who actually give a damn, same.
me [at] tonyrossi [dot] dev