Expel culture · 3 MIN READ · SCOUT SCHOLES · AUG 22, 2025 · TAGS: Expletives / leadership & management
TL;DR
- James Shank is Expel’s first Director of Threat Operations
- His successful career has been built largely on top of Madness and Mayhem (both literally and figuratively)
- He has a refined palette, and is a fan of sampling local delicacies
James Shank is Expel’s first ever Director of Threat Operations. He’s here to scale our threat intelligence capabilities with heaps of experience in security.
A career built on intelligence & innovation
James brings a wealth of experience from his 15-year journey in cybersecurity, with most of that time spent at Team Cymru, a signals intelligence-based global threat research company. His career progression there tells the story of someone who thrives at the intersection of technical expertise and strategic thinking (aka the chaos of the unknown).
“I occupied several different roles over my 13-year career there,” James explains. “Some of those were direct technical SMEs on different systems and different datasets. I was in charge of their most important, most prominent datasets and ran the engineering team that handled them.”
But the most intriguing chapter of his Team Cymru experience was his role as the first member of a team called “Madness and Mayhem.” This team operated under a unique mandate: deliver MVP products for new and emerging technologies in three to six weeks—work that would typically take six to nine months for a traditional engineering effort.
“The confined timeline gives you a completely different engineering problem to solve,” James notes. “You have to execute from day one. You don’t have time to pause for context.”
This experience shaped James’ approach to problem-solving and innovation—skills that translate directly into the fast-moving world of threat intelligence, where the ability to quickly adapt to new threats can make the difference between a contained incident and a major breach.
Choosing Expel to make an impact
What drew James to Expel wasn’t just the opportunity to build and lead—it was our fundamental approach to MDR services. “Part of the reason I came to Expel was because of how Expel built the model,” James explains. “They emphasized SOC team efficiency and SOC team accuracy as the core pillars of how to deliver quality service. I see threat intelligence acting as a shield that’s opportunistically built based on observation bias. You only see what you see, you only block what you can block. Anywhere there is a gap, the SOC team has to respond… So the founders emphasized building an incredibly well-performant SOC as a first priority.”
This philosophy aligns perfectly with James’ vision for threat operations: “Our threat intel team can help the SOC team be more responsive, more capable, more empowered, with better information and context on top of what they’re already seeing.”
But what literally brought James to Expel was one of our top analysts looking for a mentor. Our previous one-man band of threat intel (Aaron Walton, you’re an icon) turned a call for a mentor into a new team at Expel, including a leadership role for James to come in and make a splash. And James was up for the challenge.
“There’s a newness to Expel,” he says. “There’s still a lot of ground to capture, a lot that we can do, and a lot of room and potential for both innovation and strategic land grabs in terms of the market and solving problems for our customers.” Essentially, James is a fan of the chaotic good, in case you hadn’t gathered that already.
A very important question
To keep up with the status quo, we asked James a very important question in true Expel fashion.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten on purpose?” (On purpose was an interesting addition to the question, but we won’t linger on that).
After pondering for a moment, James simply said, “It’s not super weird, but I would say reindeer.”We thought that was plenty weird, but James doubled down on his answer with additional context.
“It’s not weird in certain cultures. When I was a security evangelist, I would travel around the world to meet people to discuss how to solve thorny big picture security problems.. And when I travel and sit down in a new country, I like to know what’s special about it…what their traditions are. I’m not squeamish, so when I go to new countries I often sit down and say ‘bring me whatever feels like what your mom would cook for you,’ and it’s always served me well.”
