Jay Jacobs
Founder at Empirical Security
United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJay Jacobs is a founder and veteran data scientist with 13 years focused on information security, risk analysis, and data visualization, currently leading Empirical Security and co-founding Cyentia Institute. He blends hands-on engineering—evidenced by contributions to the VERIS open standard, including Python validators and schema migration tools—with strategic leadership across industry and non-profit organizations. Jay’s background spans roles from senior data scientist at BitSight to technical architecture and analytics at Target and Verizon, giving him a rare mix of enterprise systems experience and security-focused analytics. He holds a master’s certificate in applied statistics and a BA in IT Management, and is known for turning complex incident data into auditable, visual narratives that inform risk decisions. An active community leader, he has steered professional chapters and industry groups, bringing practical rigor and open-source stewardship to security data problems.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Masters Certificate, Applied Statistics, Masters Certificate, Applied Statistics at Penn State UniversityBA, IT Management, BA, IT Management at Concordia University-St. Paul
Github Skills (11)
it-security10
json-validation10
schema-validation10
data-validation10
json-schema-validator10
validation10
python10
json-schema10
security10
github-ci4
githubaction-workflow4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
vz-risk/veris
Jan 2013 - May 2014
Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing (VERIS)
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:33 commits in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Jay primarily focused on enhancing the security and validation aspects of the VERIS (Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing) project. Their contributions include developing a Python-based validator script to check JSON data against a schema, ensuring data integrity. Furthermore, they implemented conversion scripts for migrating data between different VERIS schema versions (1.2 and 1.3), modifying and updating the files. The commits also involve updates to the code to correctly format JSON data based on the correct naming schema.
vocabularyrecordingsharing
hrbrmstr/datavizbook
Mar 2013 - Apr 2014
Contributions:165 commits in 1 year
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