Now collaborating with professionals in India, the US, UK, and Canada, remote coaching is available worldwide.
Built from inside the industry, not outside it.
Senior Security Architect Lead at Akamai. Personal branding coach. Visiting Professor. Keynote speaker. These aren't separate things, they're one story
I spent years getting very good at something most people couldn't see.
"
Defending global enterprises from DDoS attacks, bot networks, and application-layer threats is not glamorous work. It happens at 2 am when a customer's infrastructure is under fire. It happens in packet captures, SNORT rules, and WAF configurations, not in LinkedIn posts or keynote slides. Which is exactly why I started paying attention to what does get seen, and why so many technically excellent people remain professionally invisible.
Defending the internet's most attacked infrastructure.
I joined Akamai in January 2019 as a Security Operations Center Specialist Intern supporting 100+ Prolexic customers,300+ WAF customers monitoring ~200 Gbps of baseline traffic, and keeping detection-to-mitigation response times under 5 minutes. Over the following years, I moved through Security Architect, Architect II, Lead, and now Senior Security Architect Lead, the role I hold today.
Along the way, I mitigated over 2 TB of attack traffic. I built 50+ custom rules that reduced false positives and false negatives by 99%. I delivered training to Akamai customers and SOCC staff globally. I completed a two-month Solutions Engineering rotation in EMEA to better understand the customer side of what I was building. I led incident response during high-stakes attacks, acted as the primary escalation point for critical events, and communicated directly with executives both internally and at customer organizations.
In 2021, I published a paper in IEEE on blockchain transaction processing. Curiosity doesn't stop at the job description.
CAREER TIMELINE
SOC Specialist Intern
Live DDoS monitoring · Incident triage · Traffic analysis · Customer-focused defense
2019
SOC Specialist
100+ Prolexic customers · ~200 Gbps Baseline · Sub-5 min response
2020
Security Architect
50+ Custom rules · 1TB+ mitigated · 5 C-level Presentations
2022
Security Architect II
SOCC projects · Mentored ew hires · EMEA rotation 2023
2025
Security Architect II Lead
Incident response lead · Executive comms · Cross-functional Leadership
2026
Senior Security Architect Lead
Current Role
The most skilled people in the room were often the least visible.
I noticed something working in cybersecurity that bothered me: the most skilled people in the room were often the least visible. Not because they didn't have things worth saying, they absolutely did, but because nobody had ever helped them figure out how to say it. The gap between what people are capable of and how they present themselves online is one of the most fixable, most overlooked problems in a professional's career.
I started teaching Computer Networking at BMS College of Engineering because I wanted to bring real SOCC incident patterns into a classroom, not just textbook theory. My students don't just learn how networks work, they learn how networks fail, how attackers think, and what defending infrastructure actually looks like from inside a global security operations center.
The personal brand coaching came from the same place. I kept meeting professional engineers, architects, and analysts who were doing genuinely impressive work and completely invisible online. So I started helping them. Resume reviews turned into LinkedIn overhauls, which turned into positioning conversations, which turned into a coaching practice. I host The Goyal Show to keep that conversation public. I speak at colleges and events to reach students before they start their careers off on the wrong foot. And I run workshops and 1:1 engagements for professionals who are ready to close the gap between their real value and how they show up online.
Three principles that run through everything I do.
Clarity before content.
If you don't know what you stand for, what you actually do, whom you do it for, and why you're the right person to do it, then posting more won't fix it. Clarity is the work. Content is just what happens after.
Story before strategy.
A framework without a human story is just another template. The professionals who build real presence online aren't the ones with the best tactics; they're the ones who know their story and aren't afraid to tell it.
Systems over hustle.
Consistency beats intensity every time. I help people build things that work without them having to force it, positioning systems, content habits, and profiles that do the work even when they're not actively posting.
The work, in numbers.
300+
PROFESSIONALS MENTORED
7+
YEARS AT AKAMAI
25+
WORKSHOPS DELIVERED
20+
PODCAST EPISODES
