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Speaker

Joshua Grose

Joshua Grose

Hacker. Builder. Community Leader. | Chief Engineer & AI/Cyber Research Fellow @SAIC

Tampa, Florida, United States

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The thing I do best is make people believe something matters. Not through slides or persuasion tactics, but because I actually believe it, and I've done the work to back it up. I've done it in boardrooms and on conference stages, in middle school classrooms and in conversations with people who needed someone to tell them the truth. When I care about something, I can make you care about it too. Thirty years of making sure I only pick things worth caring about.

I was an Amiga 500 kid setting up school computer labs in middle school, writing JavaScript browser exploits in 9th grade (1996, the year Netscape shipped JavaScript), and disclosing injection vulnerabilities on live sites at fourteen.

Two decades of defense, enterprise, and cloud since then. I supported USCENTCOM, advised CENTCOM hunt teams, built as a Principal Architect at SAIC, conceived a cloud simulation program everyone said was impossible (it won Program of the Quarter), and spent nearly three years as a Staff Security Consultant at AWS. I hacked a satellite under AFRL authorization, formed SAIC's first Hack-A-Sat team (top 3% of 3,700), and placed 2nd individually in the LaunchDotCom space hacking challenge.

Today I serve concurrently as Chief Technical Strategist, Chief Engineer, and the first SAIC Research Fellow focused on AI/ML for cybersecurity. I earned it through original research on AI-driven tabletop exercises and adversarial emulation, and I'm now productizing the result.

When large language models became the infrastructure that matters, I went deep. Not at the API level. At the model layer. Refusal mechanisms, representation engineering, weight-level behavior manipulation. I built a talk on LLM abliteration with a 3D visualizer and interactive demos because a slide deck wasn't enough.

SANS/GIAC Advisory Board, 2015. IEEE Senior Member, 2020, top 10% globally. CISSP-ISSAP, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS Security Specialty.

Since 2021 I've led BSides Tampa, one of the top three BSides conferences globally, from 775 to 2,000+ participants.

I've supported the EFF for over a decade. I evangelize AI safety, privacy, and the ethical obligations of engineers. They're why I do this work.

The question I keep coming back to: what happens when AI systems act autonomously, make decisions at scale, and operate where failure has human consequences? That intersection of adversarial security, AI safety, and the ethics of how technology shapes human lives is where the most important problems live. I bring people with me when I go after them.

Area of Expertise

  • Manufacturing & Industrial Materials

BSides Tampa Closing Remarks & Prizes 2026

The curse is broken. Now it’s on you. Apply it. Build something. Break something. Improve something that matters. Stay engaged. Built by the community, for the community.

BSides Tampa 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming

May 2026 Tampa, Florida, United States

Joshua Grose

Hacker. Builder. Community Leader. | Chief Engineer & AI/Cyber Research Fellow @SAIC

Tampa, Florida, United States

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