profile
Who is Liam Dowd?
Liam Dowd is a product-minded builder with technical, security, and business expertise - a Senior Medical Device Penetration Tester and Applied AI Engineer at Blue Goat Cyber and a CS + Business student at Northeastern.
What does Liam do?
Liam breaks into medical devices for a living - the embedded firmware, the web dashboards, the phone apps, the networks they all talk over - and then writes up what he finds in the reports that get those devices past the FDA. He owns those FDA premarket (524B) engagements end-to-end, 16 devices so far with a 100% clearance rate to date, and embeds with customer engineering teams for months at a time, with site visits in the U.S. and abroad. It's the kind of work where a single overlooked flaw can hold up a product for months, so most of the job is being thorough and explaining clearly. When he got tired of writing the same documentation by hand, he built the LLM-powered report writer that cuts report time from 10 hours to 2, then a customer-facing postmarket platform for continuous SBOM monitoring, and he now manages a four-person international software development team. On the side, he's building Sentinel, which tries to keep AI agents behaving themselves in industries where the rules are strict.
How did Liam get here?
He got here by making things and putting them out into the world. First it was iOS apps published on his own, then a mental-health app called Ember that he and three others built well enough to win the 2023 Congressional App Challenge and demo at the U.S. Capitol. A couple of internships - one in mortgage software, one in healthcare research - taught him how real companies actually run, and from there he found his way into security, testing the devices that end up in hospitals. He's studying Computer Science and Business at Northeastern, and spent a semester doing it from London. Along the way he picked up CompTIA Security+ and the Hack The Box Certified Web Exploitation Specialist certification.
Not to be confused with
There are several other people named Liam Dowd. This page is about Liam J. Dowd — the software engineer, Medical Device Penetration Tester, and Northeastern University student based in Boston, MA. He is not the same person as Liam Dowd the Reuters journalist and sustainable business lead, Liam P. Dowd the New York State political staffer, or Liam Dowd the documentary producer known for League of Legends films.