Expel culture · 3 MIN READ · SCOUT SCHOLES · MAY 9, 2025 · TAGS: Expletives / leadership & management
TL;DR
- Fred House, VP of Detection Engineering and Innovation, leads our Detection & Response Engineering and Data Science teams at Expel
- Fred is a Virginia Tech graduate and a lifelong Hokie fan
- He’s trilingual, and would want to be invisible if he got to take a skill from a fictional character
Fred House is the VP of Detection Engineering and Innovation at Expel. He’s currently residing in New Jersey, and is an avid Virginia Tech fan (and alumnus), and leads two groups here at Expel: Detection & Response Engineering and Data Science.
The path to Expel
Fred started his career in software engineering, and then about a decade later moved into cybersecurity on the offensive side, working in computer network operations. From there, he was intrigued by the defensive side of security operations, and someone in his network pointed him towards a company named Mandiant (if you know, you know). After joining Mandiant, he remained there through their FireEye acquisition, and moved from incident response to product innovation before finding his way to Expel.
(Author’s note: at this point in the interview, Fred pointed out a tiny rubber chicken behind him wearing a Virginia Tech jersey, and said “that’s a story for another time.” We, in fact, did not circle back to that, and so the mystery of the chicken remains.)
A previous colleague that now worked at Expel told him about the company. Here were Fred’s first impressions:
“I wasn’t looking and wasn’t specifically interested in Expel. But as soon as I started the interview process, it didn’t take long before I knew it was a good fit for me. And this might come off as a little bit cheesy, but it was because of the mission focus. In the years leading up to joining Expel, I had lost a little bit of connection with the mission, and I didn’t realize how much I was missing that. That mission focus is still present to this day, and I realized when I started interviewing that’s partially because a lot of the founders and early adopters at Expel came from Mandiant which also has a very strong mission focus. I felt motivated, and I knew I would be excited to go to work each morning again.”
Challenging himself (and Expel) to grow and scale
When asked about his favorite part of working here, Fred didn’t hesitate. “I already talked about the mission, and that’s what brought me here, but I would also add the culture. It’s very real, and I underestimated it and didn’t appreciate it. I think I’m a bit of a pessimist—you see companies get listed as ‘Best Places to Work,’ and I usually discount that. And that was probably because I worked in some places in the past that didn’t have a strong culture, and I didn’t know what great felt like.”
From there, he transitioned into how he’s striving to leave his mark by improving himself and the company, and what that looks like in his day-to-day. “The challenge with Expel, and presumably most successful startups, is making that transition from a startup to a large, efficient enterprise. When you’re a startup you focus on creating innovative or disruptive technology, and not necessarily scalable processes; for example, it’s a lot easier for a small Detection Engineering team to ensure consistent quality of new detections; delivering that same quality with a much larger team requires establishing scalable processes and supporting tooling. So, part of what I’m helping us do at Expel is to take our Detection Engineering and Data Science teams to the next level by helping them scale.”
Fred shared he has different focuses daily since he’s running two teams. He tries to find ways to keep himself relevant as a security practitioner every day, whether he’s keeping up with emerging threats or diving into the advancements his teams are making internally. “It’s not always easy to keep up with all the details, but I’m always trying to understand at a technical level how we’re mitigating threats, and therefore how we can continue to evolve. At the same time we’re trying to improve that ability to scale, so that’s ultimately where I spend a lot of my time.”
Fun facts and a very important question
As we always do at Expel, we had to take a moment and ask Fred more about himself outside of work. He’s traveled the world and lived in many different cultures, including Argentina and the United Arab Emirates. He can speak “advanced tourist level” Spanish from his stint in South America, and his proficiency in French comes from meeting his French-speaking spouse in a Spanish-speaking country (say that five times fast).
As for his very important question, Fred was asked: If you could transfer the skills of one fictional character to yourself, what would it be? At first he delayed his answer, because he didn’t want to “cop out” and pick a superhero, but in the interest of time, he did just that. Fred’s choice ultimately was invisibility, like Violet from The Incredibles, because while he most definitely does not want to see the future (“I think that would be a curse in disguise”), his understanding of the present would be greatly improved by walking around undetected.
