[gnfargbl]

The challenge here is your choice of specialism. Security is fundamentally a trust-based business and the industry is pretty wary of anyone with a perceived black mark against them. The reasons for this are mainly liability ("if this guy does something wrong and he already has a record, how will we look?") and reputation ("what will our government customers think about us if we hire this person?").

Could/would you consider a sideways step to something less directly security based? For instance there might be data engineering roles that might suit.

[jstarfish]

My experience is different. I'm not a felon but I come across them in the workplace fairly often as an internal investigator. We have infosec personnel working for us with nonviolent sex offender convictions who also maintain security clearances (defense contractor). Life does not end with a conviction; don't wear a sandwich board broadcasting it but honesty goes a long way. It's the lies that I'll eventually hang you with.

Go west if you can. If you're on the east coast it's hell. The "liability" concerns are (IME) a pervasive east-coast racist myth from the 60s, but it's a real threat. The same justification was used to expand routine drug screening from forklift operators and truck drivers to keyboard jockeys. Equifax did drug testing of white-collar employees and did not hire criminals; so much for their liability and reputation following the worst data breach in history. It's all bullshit; both justifications are veiled cause to not hire blacks.

Mind your co-workers inclined to cyberstalk everyone around them and using your skeletons to raise PR hell to advance their own career. We've unfortunately thrown employees under the bus due to public outcry. Social "justice" in action! (What was the prison sentence for, if not justice...?)

[gnfargbl]

There's some decent but counterintuitive advice in here, OP: have you tried applying to a job with a clearance requirement? That way your past gets (should get) evaluated within a defined decision making framework, instead of by a spooked recruiter using their lizard brain.

[pyuser583]

The point of security is to remove trust as a requirement.

Poster could say, “you don’t need to trust me, that’s the point of {insert product or service}”.

[gnfargbl]

OP is doing "SecOps" which is incident response and security automation. The service includes him as a moving part.