About Me
Steffany Bahamon
Technology Educator & Technical Curriculum Developer
Chicago, IL | Miami roots | Colombian heritage
Background
I'm a Colombian-American technologist and educator who bridges cultures, languages, and technical expertise. Growing up in Miami gave me a deep connection to Latin American culture and the warmth of tropical waters. For the past ten years, Chicago has been home—where Lake Michigan's cool depths have taught me resilience through Midwest winters and inspired my appreciation for the city's rich architectural and cultural history.
My career in technology has been driven by a single mission: making complex technical concepts accessible to everyone. I've designed and delivered over 600 classes across cybersecurity, data analysis, and emerging technologies—building curriculum from scratch, measuring learner outcomes, and continuously iterating on what works. My audiences have ranged from complete beginners to experienced professionals, and I teach in both English and Spanish, ensuring that language is never a barrier to building real skills.
Professional Focus
My work sits at the intersection of education, technology, and program design. I specialize in:
- Technical Curriculum Development: Curating raw material into structured, reusable curriculum—courses, hands-on labs, demos, and presentations—and keeping it current as the products it covers ship
- Learning Program Design: Building curriculum and training programs from the ground up—designing learning paths, creating assessments, and measuring outcomes to ensure real skill development
- Hands-On AI: Building working demos, labs, and pipelines against LLM products and APIs—exercises designed to hold up in a live classroom, not just on a slide
- Bilingual & Cross-Cultural Instruction: Delivering technical education in English and Spanish, building inclusive learning environments that serve diverse communities
Enablement, Hands-On
I spent 6+ years as a Senior Cyber Defense Educator at Darktrace, teaching security teams how to defend against machine-learning-driven attacks—600+ technical training sessions delivered in English and Spanish, 16 courses built, and certification exams designed. That meant curating a fast-moving product into teachable curriculum and keeping courses, labs, and demos current release after release. Before that, I built cloud and security infrastructure at Capital One, so I know the technology from the builder's side as well as the teacher's.
I go hands-on with the technology I teach. I've built a GPT-style transformer from scratch through the ARENA curriculum and done mechanistic interpretability work with TransformerLens (induction heads, ablations), and I compete in Gray Swan's AI red-teaming and jailbreak arenas. I build with LLM products and APIs end to end: On Record, my civic tracker, runs a daily pipeline of Whisper transcription, LLM extraction, and cross-model verification. Claude is part of my everyday toolkit—much of this site's build tooling and agent-readiness setup was built with Claude Code. I'm also an alum of BlueDot Impact's Technical AI Safety course; making AI both safe and legible to the people who use it is a thread that runs through all my work.
Beyond Work
When I'm not teaching or building systems, you'll find me:
- Housing Advocacy: Co-lead of Abundant Housing Illinois; testified before the Illinois Senate Executive Committee on the BUILD housing package
- Exploring Chicago: From architecture boat tours to discovering the history behind the city's neighborhoods and skyline
- Travel Planning: Always plotting the next adventure, whether it's exploring new cities or revisiting favorite places
- Learning: Constantly curious about new technologies, security research, adult learning, and ways to improve how we teach and learn
Languages
Fluent in English and Spanish. This website is available in both languages—feel free to toggle between them using the language selector in the navigation.
Get in Touch
I'm always interested in connecting with fellow educators, technologists, learning designers, and anyone passionate about making technology more accessible and helping others grow.