James Alseth
Senior Security Engineer at Google
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Alseth is a Senior Security Engineer with eight years of hands-on experience securing cloud infrastructure and developer workflows, currently at Google in Seattle. He blends threat modeling, architecture review, and pragmatic tooling—authoring Python and Go solutions and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Ansible—to harden services on GCP and AWS. At Yubico he built monitoring and osquery/Kolide Fleet-based detection pipelines and a GAE-deployed auditor for third‑party OAuth access, cutting exposure risk to company data. An active open-source contributor, he has improved usability and logging in prominent projects like Kolide Fleet and Open Policy Agent’s conftest, demonstrating attention to developer experience as well as security. Colleagues rely on him for clear security guidance across engineering teams and for turning security requirements into testable, automated controls.
8 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Associates of Applied Science (AAS) Computer Networking Data Recovery, Associates of Applied Science (AAS) Computer Networking Data Recovery at Highline CollegeBachelor’s Degree Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Software Engineering at Western Governors University
Github Skills (25)
opa10
back-end-development10
testing10
command-line-interface10
osquery10
open-policy-agent10
go10
command-line10
logging10
backend10
cli10
filesystem9
file-management9
json9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
open-policy-agent/conftest
Jun 2021 - Jan 2023
Write tests against structured configuration data using the Open Policy Agent Rego query language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 208 reviews, 34 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:James Alseth primarily focused on improving the usability and maintainability of the `conftest` tool. Their contributions included adding helpful usage messages, fixing configuration issues related to hyphens, and adding the OPA version to the output. They also worked on refactoring the JUnit output format and introducing new built-in functions, demonstrating a focus on improving the developer experience and integration with other tools.
policyqueryagentstructuredtesting
kolide/fleet
Aug 2020 - Oct 2020
A flexible control server for osquery fleets
Role in this project:Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:1 review, 8 commits, 8 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:James contributed to the Fleet control server by addressing compatibility issues with Go 1.15, specifically related to string(int) conversions. They implemented a compression option for filesystem logs, adding configurability for log rotation. Further, they added the osquery version to the host information displayed in `fleetctl get hosts`, and fixed a string(int) issue in the Kinesis logger. Lastly, they enhanced the user interface by adding the hostname to the delete host confirmation modal.
host-instrumentationmacadminsecurityinfosecosquery
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.