Jason Payne is a Sales Engineer at Torq, where he helps security teams modernize the SOC with AI-driven automation. He brings roughly two decades in cybersecurity, with a career that runs from the analyst's seat to the operations leadership chair. Jason spent nearly a decade leading security operations as a Senior Director, running a 24/7 MDR SOC, before moving into solutions engineering and security architecture. His earliest work was decidedly hands-on, from deploying intrusion detection and cleaning up compromised hosts to building the monitoring systems behind a rapidly scaling platform. That operator's background is the through-line: Jason has triaged the incidents, led the teams that live in the queue, and now focuses on how AI can carry that load without adding risk. He is based in Houston, Texas.