Craig Troop
> thesis Proving, not testing, is the only honest way to ship software whose failure modes are measured in lives, money, or national trust. > // I proved a thing today. Yes, really proved it.
I'm a strategic leader working at the intersection of cybersecurity and software engineering. Over two decades in the U.S. Army and as a Senior Technical Lead at the National Security Agency, I've led cross-functional teams through the hard parts — shipping novel research into production, modernizing cryptographic systems, and building the guardrails that keep critical infrastructure trustworthy.
My current research, in the Doctor of Engineering program at George Washington University, focuses on formal verification — the mathematics of proving software behaves exactly as specified. It's a field small enough that every serious practitioner knows every other, and consequential enough that the work matters for decades after it ships.
I'm transitioning from active service and open to senior engineering and research leadership roles where rigor and scale are both non-negotiable.
- Writing my doctoral proposal on formal verification of cryptographic protocols.
- Mentoring two junior engineers through their first CI/CD-in-a-classified-environment pivot.
- Preparing to step out of uniform after twenty years.
- Led cross-organizational teams to operationalize novel research technologies, increasing software delivery speed by over 90% while hardening cryptographic systems critical to national security.
- Drove enterprise alignment with NIST and RMF, instituting CI/CD and security-compliance practices across the organization.
- Presented at internal conferences to disseminate lessons learned and accelerate adoption of best practices.
> open to senior engineering & research leadership where rigor and scale are both non-negotiable. > currently transitioning from active service. available Q3 2026. > signal::noise low. promise.