Inside Illumio: Zachi Neuman

Inside Illumio is a monthly series that highlights the exceptional individuals behind Illumio's world-class products. Each post will peek behind the scenes to spotlight a member of our team. Come get to know us a little better and learn more about what makes Illumio's culture so unique.

This month, meet Zachi Neuman, Senior Staff Security Engineer at Illumio. Learn the new skills he's picked up while working at Illumio, why running to challenges is key to his role, and what makes Illumio a fun place to work.

Tell me about yourself. What do you do at Illumio?

I've been at Illumio for over a year and a half and run the detection engineering program as part of the security team. I manage the Security Operations Center (SOC), working on incident response, reverse engineering, and forensics. Basically, my work is trying to find bad actors lurking around in our network.

It's great to work in security at a security company - people take security seriously at Illumio. We get a lot of cooperation with the organization which makes our job easier.

What made you interested in working at Illumio?

I applied to my current role because I was excited to work in the Zero Trust security space and was impressed with Illumio's products. But it was the people that made me accept the job offer.

During the interview process, it was easy to talk with everyone, and the atmosphere at Illumio felt comfortable. My interviewers at Illumio were just as interested in how I interacted with others as they were about my knowledge and skills. This was different than other interviews I was having at the time and showed me Illumio's values.

I also appreciated that people asked the hard questions that didn't always have a simple answer - something that is especially important in security.

Even after almost two years at Illumio, I still feel the same way about my coworkers as I did in my interviews.

What does a day in the life of Zachi look like? What are you working on that excites you?

My day-to-day work consists of reacting to alerts, finding network security gaps, and building ways to cover those gaps and improve our network's security. I perform incident response, forensics, and reverse engineering to find the source of threats. My goal is to continually improve our security and find ways to write best practices into our processes.

It's especially exciting to see Illumio's products implemented on our own network. As someone who works in security, I like working with our products, and it's great to use our products the same ways our customers do.

What is the most important thing you've learned at Illumio so far?

Cloud forensics is an area I've learned a lot about while at Illumio. My previous work experience was largely in government where the cloud isn't as widely adopted yet, so I didn't come to Illumio with robust cloud forensics experience. I've learned a lot about the process at Illumio, like GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) and building management, among other skills.

I appreciate the opportunities I've had at Illumio to learn new things and work in areas I haven't been able to before.

What are you passionate about outside of your career?

I love spending time with my family and friends. I'm also an avid snowboarder.

I also just really love my work - I know that's cliché to say, but I really do! I spend quite a bit of time researching in my spare time. You can find me at night reading security report threads published on Twitter. I'm also active in a few security groups online.

Which Illumio core value resonates with you the most?

Run to challenges is the one that really resonates with me. It's a key part of my role and reminds me to not be afraid of failure. Even if the entire problem can't be solved in the moment, you can always solve at least part of it or find a way to approach it from a new, creative angle.

This kind of thinking is important in my role. I love working on challenges and stirring the pot in terms of introducing new ideas or difficult questions. I don't mind running into a wall as long as I'm learning new things along the way.

What do you want people to know about working at Illumio?

Working at Illumio is fun. Illumio has a great culture, and it's a great company.

I especially enjoy the in-person events hosted at Illumio's Sunnyvale headquarters. I appreciate the opportunity to get to know my coworkers in a more informal way and have fun apart from work.

Interested in joining the team? Check out our career openings.