Zachary Newman
Advisory Board Member at Jane Street
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZachary Newman is a software engineer and advisory board member with 14 years of experience building secure, production-grade systems across research labs, startups, and large cloud providers. He blends applied cryptography and software supply-chain security—publishing research and influencing product direction at Chainguard—with hands-on engineering at Google and Jane Street. An active open-source contributor, he has improved critical projects like go-tuf and sigstore/cosign, adding secure update standards (TAP-12) support and hardening build/release and secret-handling workflows. Educated at MIT and Columbia, he pursued a PhD in computer science while producing practical tooling for reproducible builds and authenticated data structures. Known for turning deep research into deployable features, he favors pragmatic, audit-friendly solutions such as zero-knowledge-enabled signing and environment-driven key management.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Unfinished), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Unfinished), Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, 4.01/4.3, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, 4.01/4.3 at Columbia University
Github Skills (20)
github-ci10
code-signing10
bash10
tuf10
cicd10
security10
go10
build-automation10
golang10
githubaction-workflow10
testing9
dockers9
go-testing9
containerization9
supply-chain-management9
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
sigstore/cosign
Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
Code signing and transparency for containers and binaries
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:326 reviews, 19 commits, 87 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Zachary primarily contributed to the codebase by improving the build and deployment processes and enhancing the codebase's overall robustness. They refactored and optimized build scripts, specifically by switching bash interpreters to a more portable method. They also addressed security concerns by implementing secure handling of sensitive information, such as OIDC client secrets. Furthermore, the user improved the project's build and release process by increasing the timeout for the goreleaser. Finally, the user added functionality for retrieving keys via environment variables.
containerscryptographycosignsigningsign
theupdateframework/go-tuf
Jan 2022 - Oct 2022
Go implementation of The Update Framework (TUF)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:186 reviews, 22 commits, 57 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Zachary primarily contributed to the implementation and refinement of the TUF (The Update Framework) Go implementation. Their work involved adding features like allowing commits without adding targets and improving error messages. Furthermore, the user enhanced the testing suite by adding new test cases to cover different error paths and ensure code robustness. They also implemented support for TAP-12, which is a standard for securing software updates.
golangsecuritysupply-chainupdatetuf
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