How this IT professional found security at Berkadia

Technical.ly is a free news resource thanks to financial supporters like Berkadia, a Technical.ly client, which sponsored this article. It was reviewed before publication. Learn more about Berkadia here.

Sometimes, the long and winding road can end up taking you back home. Such was the case for Philly-area native Jon Dobisch, who spent years bouncing around the country for various IT jobs before landing at Ambler-based commercial real estate firm Berkadia.

During Philly Tech Week 2024, Dobisch attended Technical.ly’s NET/WORK job fair, where he met with Berkadia team members and discussed career opportunities. As a Technical.ly client, Berkadia has promoted its innovation-focused culture through articles highlighting tech leaders and posts on Technical.ly’s jobs board, and the IRL gathering gave Dobisch the chance to make a strong impression. Not long after connecting with Berkadia at the event, he started his new role there as a security engineer.

“Since I began my job search, Berkadia has really impressed me,” Dobisch said. “A lot of companies say that they care about their people or cybersecurity. Berkadia actually really seems to care about both.”

And although the main focus of his role is cybersecurity, he feels he’s found job security as well: “In the past few months, I’ve attended countless company events, where I’ve met many employees who have been with the organization for years, even decades, which says a lot nowadays.”

Read on to learn more about Dobisch and his journey to joining the Berkadia team.

What is your current role, and what are your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities like? 

I am a security engineer at Berkadia. Mainly, I’m focused on the application security/DevSecOps space, but I also get the opportunity to do some web penetration testing. As part of the security organization, our goal is to give all Berkadians the tips, tricks and tools necessary to promote a safe and secure environment. Within the application security team, we are tasked with promoting this goal throughout our software development lifecycle. This means working with hundreds of internal software developers across many parts of Berkadia.

On a daily basis, we work towards our mission through security awareness trainings, conducting code and tooling audits and reducing risk by remediating vulnerabilities. We are outnumbered 100 to 1, but if we can train hundreds of developers to see the importance of security, we will reduce risk faster than any small team could ever accomplish.

What was your background before joining Berkadia? 

Over the last decade, I’ve had the opportunity of working in a variety of roles throughout IT. This experience has landed me at companies in varying parts of the country from Silicon Valley to the deep south in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Being originally from this area, I’m excited to bring all of my experience back to the Philadelphia region. Application security can be very complex work, requiring a lot of different skill sets. I’ve been fortunate to explore many parts of IT, which has allowed me to feel very prepared for this kind of work.

What are you excited about most in your new role?

In my line of work, a great security culture is absolutely vital, and I see this at Berkadia from the top-down. It can be very difficult to implement security best practices at organizations where leaders do not care. At Berkadia, I feel empowered to be successful. A large part of that empowerment is due to the organization’s long-term investments in people and technology in the security space.

What interests do you enjoy outside of work?

Maybe it came with age, or the pandemic, but I’ve really gotten into golf over the last couple of years. It’s a complicated game that you can play for decades, trying to learn and improve. It’s really a lot like information security in the way that I feel like I’ll never get bored. Since moving back to Philly, I also adopted a dog (Charlie) and he definitely keeps me busy. Not to mention, I like to get involved with the local security community. Shoutout to our OWASP Philly chapter!

What part did Technical.ly play in your job search?

During this year’s recent Philly Tech Week, I had the opportunity to help run a CTF (capture the flag) event hosted by OWASP Philly. If you’ve never had the chance to attend one, I highly recommend it. Basically, a CTF is a “hacking” style competition where teams or individuals look for hidden clues or “flags.”

On the same day as the CTF, Philly Tech Week hosted a great job fair. This was probably my first in-person job fair in almost a decade. As it turned out, in a world where career connections are mostly made online, this job fair was a great opportunity to network and meet local employers. I did some research on companies in attendance and saw that Berkadia was looking for a new DevSecOps engineer. Based on the job description, I knew I’d be a perfect fit. There was something special about meeting the recruiter in person, and now getting to work together to further expand our team.

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