After Pandoc fell flat, I deployed Gotenberg — a stateless PDF API with Chromium inside — on an unprivileged LXC container. Docker-in-LXC, it turns out, is easier than I remembered.
About Me
I am Niklas, a sociable IT-er with a passion for CyberSecurity.
I am Belgian by birth but moved to Switzerland when I was young, absorbing the culture and mindset. Coming from a big family my heart already had a lot of space for those dear to me, the Swiss-Italian culture made room for a lot more.
Finding work is one of those beroepsmisvormingen that I carry over from working in Horeca. When hired, I initially set out to learn the job and people, finding small (or big) efficiency gains that can be made. Once I'm comfortable and worked in, I look for enhancements that help out the whole team.
My primary job has been Back-end revamping, setting up Cybersecurity capture the flags, operations in integrations, setting up CI/CDs, training others in technologies and tools, developing cloud deployment pipelines, operational security and most recently, a jump to cybersecurity assessments.
Skills
Security ▾
SOC
SIEM
Incident Response
NIST
Blue Team Tools ▾
Splunk
Elastic
Wireshark
Suricata
Tech Stack ▾
Python
Terraform
Linux
Docker
Soft Skills ▾
Adaptability
Curious
Languages
Certifications
Side Projects
Resume
Experience
05/2025 — Present
Cybersecurity Architect
Splynter · Antwerp, Belgium- Setting up and improving security standards based on NIST-SP 800-53 and ISO 27001; translating regulatory obligations into technical controls
- Head security assessor for high-impact projects — Windows 11 rollout, PAM, CoPilot, Anti-Money Laundering, Network modernisations — including M365/Entra ID/Intune security baseline, device compliance and identity controls
- Conducted architectural security reviews and threat modeling (trust models, threat analysis, mitigations) for high-stakes financial and infrastructure systems
- Designed several processes to enhance collaboration between security assessment, pentest, incident response and monitoring, creating an efficiency gain for all projects of 10%
- Writing KQL queries, analytics rules and detection logic; developing Sentinel playbooks (SOAR/Logic Apps automation) for SOC workflows
- Developed and trained 20+ colleagues on safe usage of agentic AI and AI for developing software
- Creating re-usable security patterns for the organization, guaranteeing consistent and secure software delivery
- Wrote an impersonation architecture in .NET
- Product Owner for the architecture of a new product used for compliance
09/2023 — 05/2025
Integration Consultant
Solita · Leuven, Belgium- Documentation for- and training of other junior DevOps engineers of integration platform (messaging, iPaaS, file transfer, ...) and incident response procedures
- Maintained >99% SLA compliance across P1–P3 incidents over 18 months of integration platform operations
- Used, built & improved several CICD tools including deployment and staging automation, testing, monitoring & logging
- Reduced code vulnerability exposure by introducing automated SAST scanning across CI/CD pipelines
- Part of a task force to improve system performance, decreasing real-time APIs by 30–60%
- Using Terraform, Python and Bash scripting, developed an automatic deployment of iPaaS platform with built-in scalability, access control and monitoring
10/2019 — 08/2023
Bartender Manager
DE WEERELT · Leuven, Belgium- Entirely responsible for the well-being of clients at my bar
- Often being the only bartender present and working until 5 A.M., every week presents new challenges and opportunities to learn from
07/2022
Internship
Solita · Leuven, Belgium- Delivered a fully playable Capture-the-flag covering all 10 OWASP API Security risks within a 3-month internship window
- Studied the security possibilities of Gravitee, an open-source API Management software
- Coded the front-end website associated to the Capture-the-flag game using Vue.js
- Built containerized application using Python and JavaScript, deployed on Azure
07/2021 — 10/2021
Backend Developer
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Part of a team responsible for expanding existing software to comply with new features
- Wore the hat of a back-end developer and a data engineer by refactoring the Python code and restricting the database to deal with complex requirements
- Use of Docker for reproducibility and ease of branching
09/2020 — 02/2021
DRAMA Teaching Assistant
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Helping first year students with learning a Dutch Assembly Language
11/2017 — 10/2019
Waiter
Notre Dame Quasimodo · Leuven, Belgium- Worked full-time serving the largest brasserie in Leuven
- Trained new people
Education
2021 — 2023
MEng Computer Science · Security
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Software engineering, system architecture, requirements engineering
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning
- Secure software using state automatons, developing buffer overflows and other basic C exploits
- Thesis around Pseudoanonymisation within distributed file saving architecture, compliant with the GDPR
2018 — 2021
Bachelor in Computer Science
KU Leuven · Leuven, Belgium- Mathematical foundation of Computer Science: automata, logic and programming paradigms
- Building of software: the software life-cycle, maintenance, design patterns, data structures, and time/space complexity of algorithms
- Bachelor Thesis in building a recommender system for students taking imperative programming language course using SKLearn ML
2013 — 2017
High School
Liceo Lugano 1 · Lugano, Switzerland- Physics & the application of Mathematics
- Course on Informatics, exploring my IT-teacher's Cyber abilities
Blog Posts
Deploying N8N — the open-source workflow automation tool — inside an LXC container on my Proxmox home lab.
From red team to blue team—my experience earning the HTB Certified Defensive Security Analyst certification and learning to think like a defender.
Repurposing an old laptop to encrypt my data at rest and host ProxMox to deploy VMs/Containers, all managed via Terraform.
The shortcuts, references, and DNS tweaks I used to get a custom-domain GitHub Pages site online in a weekend.
How Billbuddy moved from a tucked-away home lab to a carefully exposed service with hardened edges.