Zahid Mudaqiq

Zahid Mudaqiq brings over six years of enterprise security and regulatory compliance experience from IBM, where he serves as Senior Cloud Infrastructure Security Consultant. At IBM, he has led compliance assessments across NIST 800-53, NIST 800-41, CIS Benchmarks, and HIPAA frameworks for Fortune 500 clients, developing and enforcing over 400 security policies across enterprise firewall and zero-trust architectures.

His expertise spans security information and event management (IBM QRadar, Microsoft Sentinel), zero-trust network architecture (Zscaler ZIA/ZPA/ZDX), and regulatory compliance auditing, the exact disciplines required to oversee data protection for a protocol that processes biometric verification data across international jurisdictions.

Prior to IBM, Zahid held a systems administration role at Radio Free Europe in Prague, the independent news organization that has defended press freedom in censored countries since 1950. This early-career experience at the intersection of technology and journalism aligns directly with TIP Protocol's mission to protect journalist identity and content provenance.

Zahid holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and Systems from Marist University with a concentration in Information Technology and minors in Cybersecurity and Computer Science (Dean's List, 3.61 GPA). He holds CompTIA Security+, AWS Cloud Practitioner, and Zscaler Advanced certifications.

As Data Protection Officer at The AI Lab, Zahid oversees TIP Protocol's GDPR Data Protection Impact Assessment, privacy architecture compliance, biometric data handling policies, and cross-jurisdictional data protection strategy across GREEN, AMBER, and RED-tier VP jurisdictions.