Matty Lite arrived at WOCS 24-001 as a Specialist (E4), which made him the lowest-ranking candidate in the cohort. An E4 among Staff Sergeants, Sergeants First Class, and First Sergeants, Burns walked in with a stack of industry certifications taller than his rank would suggest and a laptop that had probably seen more action than his ruck sack.
A Kentucky National Guardsman with six-plus years in the Signal and cyber trenches, Burns works as a DevSecOps engineer by day: building secure pipelines, hardening Kubernetes clusters, and automating things that most people do by hand. His Army role as a Cyber Warfare Technician means he also gets to do the fun stuff: threat hunting, ICS/OT network analysis, and defending the kind of infrastructure that keeps the lights on.
He holds a degree in Cybersecurity and enough industry certifications to wallpaper a TOC, including a CISSP, multiple GIAC certs, and cloud credentials across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In his off time, he runs a home lab, tinkers with Raspberry Pis, and programs PLCs because apparently the 9-to-5 isn’t enough.
Came in the lowest. Left a Warrant Officer. Classic Matty Ice.