Christoph Hartmann is a seasoned technology leader and co-founder currently serving as CTO of Mondoo, with over a decade of experience building secure, production-ready infrastructure and developer tooling. He helped create InSpec and co-founded Vulcano Security before leading engineering at Chef, blending hands-on security engineering with product and company-building experience. Christoph is a pragmatic DevSecOps practitioner—contributing to open-source projects from test frameworks like Test Kitchen to system hardening profiles and even core protocol libraries such as xmpp.js. His background spans cloud engineering, technical product leadership, and startup founding, informed by an M.Sc. in IT-Systems Engineering and a stint at Stanford in design and entrepreneurship. Based in Berlin, he pairs deep technical craftsmanship (automated testing, compliance-as-code, SASL/Auth work) with a talent for turning security controls into developer-friendly products. Notably, his career balances shipping practical security improvements in widely used cookbooks and tooling with founding and scaling a security-focused startup.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc. IT-Systems Engineering, M.Sc. IT-Systems Engineering at Hasso-Plattner-Institute
(10 months) Stanford Design Entrepreneurship Class, (10 months) Stanford Design Entrepreneurship Class at Stanford University
Contributions:1 release, 8 reviews, 50 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Christoph contributed to the hardening of a Linux system baseline profile. Their work focused on modifying and improving tests related to system security configurations, specifically addressing exec-shield and other kernel parameters. Furthermore, the user updated and simplified test assertions within the InSpec profile, ensuring security best practices and compliance with hardening standards. The user also addressed bug fixes and implemented style improvements to the code.
This chef cookbook provides numerous security-related configurations, providing all-round base protection.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Security Engineer
Contributions:2 releases, 4 reviews, 122 commits in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Christoph primarily focused on enhancing the security posture of the Chef cookbook. Their contributions included modifying the yum package management, adding checks for package signature verification, removing insecure packages and repositories, and configuring system-level security settings via sysctl. Additionally, the user made code style fixes and refactored the codebase for improved maintainability, focusing on hardening the operating system.
cookbookdevopssecuritylinuxprotection
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.