About the principal

Pouyesh Sabouri

Engineer and engineering leader with 22 years in production infrastructure and Python, Django and automation in production since 2019. The security background is the reason the AI work holds up: two decades of network, telecom and security engineering means an agent that executes code and reaches client data gets treated as what it is — a security and operations problem first.

Full résumé → The build pitch

Trajectory

Telecom to secure infrastructure to agentic AI.

Jan 2025 – PresentBritish Columbia

AI Consultant — Sabouri.org / HPSD

Self-hosted agentic AI & security

  • Design and delivery of self-hosted agentic AI for organisations that can't send client data to an external provider — architecture, retrieval, evaluation and the security model, on their own hardware.
  • Architected and operate a production platform: retrieval over a 300,000-chunk corpus, deterministic financial computation over a live ledger, document generation, and fail-closed per-client access control — one GPU, no external API.
  • Model selection & evaluation (NVFP4/FP8 on vLLM/SGLang), retrieval engineering, data-integrity engineering, and advisory on where agentic systems are safe to place in regulated workflows — and where they're not.

Python · FastAPI · LangGraph · PostgreSQL · Qdrant · vLLM · Docker · RAG · LLM evaluation

Dec 2023 – PresentBurnaby, BC · Remote

Presales Security Expert

Fortinet

  • Technical authority on security architecture for enterprise and public-sector opportunities across Western Canada — discovery through design and proof of concept.
  • AI runtime security presales lead for an inline AI security gateway — guardrails on model input and output, mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications.
  • Context-aware DLP in the critical path of AI traffic; shadow-AI discovery and risk-based access with per-prompt audit logging and cost attribution.
  • Nine Fortinet certifications since joining, including Certified Solution Specialist, SASE.

AI runtime security · LLM guardrails · DLP · shadow-AI · SASE · NGFW · zero trust

Feb 2020 – Dec 2023Surrey, BC · Remote

Senior Network, Unix & Telecom Manager

Coast Capital Savings

  • Led 12 specialists owning a 45-branch, 600,000-member credit union's telephony, network and banking infrastructure stack.
  • Drove Python, Django and Ansible into the operational core — turning an operations group into one that ships software — and built the automation platform that creates, modifies and removes networks, VPNs, interfaces and firewall rules organisation-wide.
  • Established CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code (Jenkins, Ansible, AWS) and ITIL change/incident/problem practice.

Python · Django · Ansible · Jenkins · AWS · PostgreSQL · Linux · ITIL

Mar 2015 – Feb 2020Vancouver, BC

Team Lead — Network Services

Long View Systems

  • Consulting delivery lead across municipal government, manufacturing and hospitality — presales, RFP response, architecture, documentation and implementation.
  • Designed and deployed Palo Alto firewalls and Panorama across a municipal WAN/MPLS network; led a dual-data-centre active/active redesign; migrated a client's entire network overnight with no user impact.
  • Established security policy, change control and patching to PCI and HIPAA requirements.

Palo Alto · Panorama · Cisco FTD/FMC · NetScaler · MPLS/WAN · PCI · HIPAA

Feb 2012 – Feb 2015Edmonton, AB

Network Team Lead

Government of Alberta — Justice & Solicitor General

  • Led the network team operating secure infrastructure for Justice & Solicitor General, including Change Advisory Board planning.
  • Designed redundant secure infrastructure across three sites and a BGP multi-homed core over the Alberta SuperNet; delivered 20+ secure remote sites to protected justice applications.

Cisco · Juniper · HP · BGP · secure WAN · CAB

Feb 2004 – Feb 2012Edmonton, AB

Senior Network Specialist

TELUS

  • Provisioned and supported network services for TELUS corporate clients across a large managed estate; Tier-3 troubleshooting of Cisco routing, switching and firewalls; VPNs over MPLS, ADSL and T1.

Cisco · Check Point · MPLS · VPN

Capability

Technical skills.

Languages
Python (async/asyncio, typing), SQL, Bash, JavaScript, YAML/Jinja
Frameworks
Django, FastAPI, LangGraph, pandas, NumPy, Playwright, pytest-style regression harnesses
AI systems
RAG, hybrid vector + lexical search, cross-encoder reranking & MMR, tool-calling agent loops, prompt/context-budget engineering, evaluation corpora, vLLM / SGLang / Ollama, NVFP4 & FP8 quantisation, Unsloth SFT
AI security
LLM runtime guardrails (injection, jailbreak, poisoning, extraction), context-aware DLP over prompt/response traffic, shadow-AI discovery, OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, prompt-level audit logging, token/compute-cost governance
Data
PostgreSQL, Qdrant, Redis, SQLite, schema design & migrations, document ingestion (PDF, XLSX, DOCX, PPTX, EML, EPUB, OCR)
Automation
Ansible, Jenkins, Docker & Compose, Git, AWS, nginx, systemd, scheduled & event-driven pipelines
Infrastructure
Enterprise routing/switching, BGP/MPLS, NGFW (FortiGate, Palo Alto, Cisco FTD), VPN, NetScaler, virtualisation, mTLS & PKI, Linux/Unix

Certifications & education

Credentials.

Fortinet

  • Certified Solution Specialist, SASE 26–28
  • FortiSASE 24 Administrator 2025
  • FortiClient EMS 7.2 Administrator 2024
  • Certified Professional, Network Security 24–26
  • FortiGate 7.2 Administrator 2024
  • FortiGate 7.4 Operator 2023
  • Certified Associate, Cybersecurity 2023

Cisco to Jun 2027

  • CCNP Enterprise
  • Specialist — Enterprise Core
  • Specialist — Enterprise Design
  • Specialist — Enterprise Adv. Infra.
  • Specialist — Security Core
  • Specialist — Network Security (Firepower / VPN)
  • Specialist — Identity Mgmt / Web Content

Palo Alto

  • PCNSE — Network Security Engineer 2018

Education

  • BTech, Computer Science — TRU 2020
  • Telecom Journeyman — NAIT 2012

Languages

  • English — native/bilingual
  • Farsi — native/bilingual

Let's talk.

Whether it's a readiness review, a build, or an AI-security opinion you can take to your board.

Email Pouyesh Connect on LinkedIn