# Ryan Gerard

> Principal Engineer & Acting CISO at Hummingbird

Location: Danville, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/ryangerard

Engineer and founder focused on security at scale. I co-founded Hummingbird to modernize financial-crime operations—building a platform where casework, monitoring, and screening run on secure, observable infrastructure designed for auditors and defenders alike. I started my career in the security industry, and continued working in high security areas throughout my career. Previously: Eng Lead at Square, with earlier stints at Xobni and Symantec.

My approach: threat-model early, bake controls into architecture, and prove them with instrumentation—encryption done right, least-privilege by default, strong identity boundaries, and immutable trails that make auditors smile. I partner closely with Compliance, Risk, and Security to align secure SDLC, privacy, and reliability with business outcomes.

Focus areas: secure platform architecture, privacy-preserving data pipelines, abuse/fraud detection at scale, incident readiness, and compliance enablement for financial institutions. If you’re building for high-stakes data in fintech or adjacent domains, I’m always up for comparing notes.

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer & Acting CISO @ Hummingbird
Jan 2017 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
I design secure, resilient systems for sensitive financial data: clear trust boundaries, strong authN/Z, encryption done right, and auditability by default. I lead secure SDLC practices, cloud hardening, and incident readiness, and I partner with Compliance and customer security teams so Hummingbird ships fast and safe—turning threat models into product guardrails that stand up to real-world scrutiny.

### Engineering Lead - Caviar @ Square
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, CA
Building the best delivery experience possible. My team is responsible for building the technology that powers the web and mobile experiences for Caviar.

### Software Engineer @ Square
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area
Worked on the initial backend infrastructure for Square Market (now Square Online Store), with a focus on payments, inventory management, and categories. After the acquisition of Caviar, I was part of the team to build the iOS experience for Caviar and Fastbite.

### Cofounder and CTO @ Pickmoto
Jan 2012 – Jan 2013
Pickmoto is building the next generation of mobile sports games.

We are creating sports apps that offer fun, quick, easy competition that capture the fantasy sports experience and simplify it for more casual users.

### Director of Client Engineering @ Xobni (acquired by Yahoo!)
Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco, CA
My role here encompassed many activities. I developed Xobni's first iPhone app, and managed a fantastic group of engineers, who worked on many of Xobni's products. In the past, I've worked on server-side infrastructure, our billing and payment system, a C++ rewrite of the Outlook product, and various other projects. I am an active promoter of internal hacking projects and social events.

### Software Engineer @ Xobni (acquired by Yahoo!)
Jan 2007 – Jan 2010
As an early employee at Xobni, I had many projects. I managed a small testing team which built an automated testing and reporting infrastructure, and test tools for the Outlook product. I also worked on developing new and innovative features for the Outlook product. I worked on our build system quite a bit, as well as the Xobni installer. I took on the duties of project manager for many of our releases.

### Sr. SQA Engineer @ Symantec Corporation
Jan 2005 – Jan 2007
I was testing backend pieces of the product that eventually shipped as Norton SafeWeb, a website heuristics engine that provides a range of security information for any and all websites.  I also spent time implementing the release system for that product, and worked closely with the data center IT group to make sure it could deploy properly in production.

### SQA Engineering Intern @ Symantec Corporation
Jan 2004 – Jan 2005
Worked primarily on the first version of the AntiSpyware engine that eventually shipped with NIS.


## Education
### BS in Computer Science and Engineering
UCLA


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ryangerard
- Portfolio: http://www.ryangerard.net
- GitHub: http://github.com/rgerard
- Portfolio: http://www.pickmoto.com

---
Source: https://flows.cv/ryangerard
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ryangerard/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12