Daniel Popescu
Group Tech Lead - Security Organization
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Popescu is a seasoned security-focused engineering leader with 11 years of experience driving infrastructure and application security at scale, currently serving as Group Tech Lead for Yelp’s Security Organization in San Francisco. He combines deep hands-on engineering—contributions to open-source projects like Yelp’s PaaSTA and ElastAlert—with strategic leadership across Application, Corporate, Infrastructure, and Security Platform teams to align engineering practices with real risk. His background at Microsoft in re-architecting streaming systems, automating CI/CD, and raising test coverage complements a long-running passion for security (attending conferences for 17 years) and practical expertise in secrets management, least-privilege access, and incident automation. Known for mentoring engineers and setting technical vision, he blends tooling, automation, and policy to make security both usable and measurable.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Granada Hills High SchoolBS Computer Engineering, BS Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara
Stackoverflow
713reputation
107kreached
25answers
2questions
Github Skills (28)
kubernetes10
docker10
pytest10
back-end-development10
python10
amazon-elasticsearch10
testing10
secret-management10
dockers10
cicd10
rule-engine10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
kubernetes-pods10
elasticsearch10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Yelp/elastalert
Apr 2016 - Dec 2017
Easy & Flexible Alerting With ElasticSearch
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:75 commits, 23 PRs, 39 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on enhancing the `NewTermsRule` functionality within the `elastalert` codebase, including the implementation of support for composite keys. The user also improved the codebase by addressing bugs and refactoring existing tests to simplify the testing process. Further contributions included refactoring the codebase to leverage more efficient means of data handling, such as the elasticsearch.helpers.reindex API, and improved the Jira alerter functionality by adding the functionality for a summary table and arbitrary fields.
alertingflexiblekibanaelasticsearch
Yelp/paasta
Jun 2020 - Dec 2022
An open, distributed platform as a service
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:84 reviews, 29 commits, 15 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on improving the PaaS platform's functionality and maintainability. They were responsible for automating release processes, as indicated by the "make release" commits. The user also made improvements to the secret handling and Kubernetes integration, with changes to deployment scripts, including the local run setup. There is additional evidence of backend contributions focused on firewall configuration and Marathon integration.
mesosdockerplatform-as-a-servicedistributed-systemsmicroservices
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