I'm a security and infrastructure engineer. For a decade my work has been keeping distributed systems standing, and the user data on them safe. At the BBC I was one of three founding engineers who built and grew its site reliability capability into what still keeps everything you watch and listen to online today.

At Meta, as founding tech lead of Host Integrity (HI 👋), I set the strategy for the foundational hardware layer every cryptographic claim across the fleet (On-prem, Cloud, Edge) is built on. That spanned projects like TPM-backed encryption at rest and the guarantees backing products like WhatsApp's Private Processing and Incognito Chat with Meta AI.

The hard part has rarely been the technology. It's making the case that security and reliability are enablers rather than obstacles, and convincing people to change how they operate before an incident makes the decision for them. Calamity isn't an edge case; it's the load-bearing assumption. The craft is in how failures are considered, whether an interconnected system comes apart gently, with some warning, or all at once.

I write here to think in public. Essays on technology, security, political economy, and the human commons. Some fiction too, because I love speculation. A few of the causes I support are here. Underneath the surface, it's really one preoccupation: calamity, considered.

I'm based in London, California bred. If something here resonates (or doesn't), or if there's something you'd like to see written about, I'd genuinely like to hear from you: hello@kaylamity.com.