Employee Spotlight: Josh Rickard, Senior Software Engineer @ AppOmni

Life at AppOmni revolves around helping cybersecurity teams and SaaS application owners quickly secure their mission-critical and sensitive data. Without our employees, none of this would be possible. Our Employee Spotlight is a Q&A series dedicated to showcasing the great talent at AppOmni, recognizing the amazing work they do each and every day.

To kick it off, we’re spotlighting Josh Rickard, a Senior Software Engineer on the AppOmni Threat Detection team.

What’s your role at AppOmni?

I’m a Senior Software Engineer on the AppOmni Threat Detection team. Our team is focused on building a world class threat detection pipeline that processes billions of events daily. We’re a motley crew of security experts who use our past experiences to create, design, build and maintain highly scalable services to protect some of the largest companies in the world from SaaS-born threats.

How did you get started in cybersecurity?

Before starting in information security (InfoSec), I was a systems analyst focused on hardening Active Directory & deploying Windows systems at a fairly large scale. After doing that for a couple years, I was asked to join the central security team as part of their Incident Response team. Besides the digital forensics work, I was responsible for vulnerability management, anti-virus, phishing defense and general hardening guidance across the ecosystem. Working in higher education was an invaluable experience; you couldn’t buy the fancy tools so you had to build them yourself. I did just that, which led to me being hired at my first cybersecurity startup. The rest is history.

What do you enjoy most about working at AppOmni?

This will probably sound cliche, but it is honestly the people. I work with some of the brightest engineers I have ever met. We are all dedicated to protecting our customers, and our leadership enables us to solve problems the right way — the first time — without losing focus on quality. AppOmni is a unique company, which is evident by our products alone. 

What’s 1 thing on your bucket list?

I want to write a technical book at some point, but also there’s a few conferences I want to speak at like Microsoft BlueHat and TROOPERS. I love giving back to the security community, which has helped me so much over my career. I wouldn’t be where I am now without the InfoSec community sharing their knowledge through blog posts, conferences, open source tools and more.

What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

This depends on which younger self. As a teenager, I would tell myself to focus on school and go to college. As a 20-something I would say do everything you want to do now. Don’t worry about the future. Build that business, write that book, travel, take risks, and, most importantly, spend time with family and friends.

Interested in working at AppOmni? Check our open positions here.

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