Zach Rice
Head Of Secrets Scanning at Aikido Security
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZach Rice is a security-focused engineering leader with a decade of experience building tools that find secrets in code, currently leading Secrets Scanning at Aikido Security. He is the author of Gitleaks—a widely used open-source SAST scanner—and has driven secret-detection features at GitLab and Truffle Security through hands‑on engineering and research. Zach blends backend systems, CI/CD, and DevOps expertise (notably Gitleaks-Action) to embed scanning into developer workflows and large-scale product stacks. His background spans CDN and infra work at Gannett, agricultural modeling and weather ingestion, and an early career in systems at Fermilab and State Farm, giving him a broad systems perspective. He founded and bootstrapped commercial support for Gitleaks, automating billing and workflows with Stripe, Zapier, and GitHub Actions. Based in the Chicago area, he works remotely and continues to maintain and iterate on open-source security tooling used by enterprises and governments.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignAssociate of Science (A.S.) Electrical Engineering Science, Associate of Science (A.S.) Electrical Engineering Science at Parkland College
Stackoverflow
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0reached
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Github Skills (29)
algorithm10
git10
algorithms10
github-ci10
devsecops10
security-txt10
scripting10
open-source10
bash10
security-automation10
secrets10
data-structure10
cicd10
security10
regular-expression10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
gitleaks/gitleaks-action
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Protect your secrets using Gitleaks-Action
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:33 releases, 7 reviews, 217 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily focused on modifying the `entrypoint.sh` file, likely to configure and enhance the functionality of a GitHub Action. The commits reveal the addition of environment variable checks, event name identification (push, pull\_request), and the invocation of the `gitleaks` tool with specific parameters. These changes suggest the user was involved in integrating and refining the security scanning capabilities within the CI/CD pipeline of the repository.
protectprotect-your-secretssecret-scanningsecurity-automationsecurity-tools
gitleaks/gitleaks
Jan 2018 - Dec 2022
Find secrets with Gitleaks 🔑
Role in this project:Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:179 releases, 184 reviews, 604 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of gitleaks, a tool designed to detect secrets within Git repositories. Their work included implementing new features related to regular expression matching and file type filtering. Furthermore, the user made significant improvements in terms of security by creating stricter regular expressions for identifying secrets and by adding the capability to exclude forks during the scan process.
golangdiscoverprotectsecurity-toolssecurity
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