The Analyst Ledger

CHARLOTTE — Security work rarely announces itself. For eight years it looked like this: international flights turning on schedule, identities validated at the door, access tightly controlled, and every irregularity written down — because on a federally regulated ramp, the paperwork is the security. From 2015 to 2023, Mr. Al Kurdi served as an Aviation Security Operations Crew Chief for American Airlines in Charlotte, holding a security clearance with a CBP badge endorsement and working international flight operations under FAA, OSHA, IATA, and CBP requirements — with recurrent incident-response and safety-and-security training as a standing condition of the job.

He has since put the discipline on paper. In January 2025 he earned the CompTIA Security+ ce certification (SY0-701, valid through January 2028). In December 2025 he completed a B.S. in Information Technologies with a cybersecurity concentration at Southern New Hampshire University — summa cum laude, 3.96 GPA, inducted into the Sigma Psi chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda — conferred January 1, 2026.

The receipts are public. AgentForge, a configuration framework for agentic AI coding assistants, ships on npm with six adapter targets and a test harness standing behind it. Its companion, the AgentForge ATT&CKLens Benchmark, asks a strictly defensive question — can AI coding agents build secure, uncertainty-aware, MITRE ATT&CK-aligned defensive tooling? — and answers with seven scored artifacts and a re-runnable harness. Standings in Section B →

Mr. Al Kurdi is seeking full-time work as a SOC analyst, security operations analyst, cybersecurity analyst, incident-response analyst, junior detection engineer, or in security automation. He is based in Charlotte, N.C., and open to remote.