GitHub’s Jacob DePriest: How to attract and retain more diverse security talent

Feb 14 2023 • 37 mins

In this episode of Future of Security Operations, Thomas speaks with Jacob DePriest, VP & Deputy Chief Security Officer at GitHub, a company with a mission "to help every developer - regardless of experience level - learn, code, and ship software effectively."

Before joining GitHub, DePriest spent more than 15 years as a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.

Topics include:

How Jacob moved from a career deep in the engineering world to security
His experience working at the NSA and why curiosity led him to move to GitHub to seek out a new adventure
His experience with Open Source tools and why he believes in making tools that help the security community more widely available to handle threats
How GitHub's security team prioritizes their workload, thinks about risk, and builds trust with their customers
The vast amount of automation in place at GitHub, what they're building, and how they bring security findings as close to developers as they possibly can
How the security team influences GitHub's product roadmap and why they want to be the first customer of any new feature
His experience with Log4j and why he's proud of GitHub's response to the breach
Why he prioritizes his team's psychological safety and thinks empathy, diversity, and transparency are critical to success for any security team