About Me

If you're here as an engineer, a security practitioner, a recruiter, or just someone curious — welcome.

Feel free to explore the garden and take what's useful.

Executive Summary

I'm Rohit Jacob Mathew, a Staff Software Development Engineer building security-first platforms at scale. I work on SecOps and platform engineering at Trellix, turning complex security, compliance, and scale requirements into reliable, observable, cloud-native platforms that teams can confidently build on.

Over the years, I've worked across the full spectrum of platform engineering — from early-stage scale-ups to enterprise security — with a consistent focus on security, privacy, and developer experience.

🏗️ What I Work On Today

As part of the Platform Engineering team at Trellix, I operate at the intersection of architecture, technical leadership, and execution, owning and influencing systems that run at enterprise scale.

Current Focus Areas:

Co-architecting a data pipeline services handling security telemetry
Leading observability strategy with early OpenTelemetry adoption
Designing secure, cloud-native microservices
Building enterprise-grade services for FedRAMP

Platform Impact:

Supporting Trellix Marketplace & Developer Portal
Evolving ePO cloud security platform
Mentoring engineers on security & architecture

Impact shows up in improved real-time threat detection & improved incident response, without compromising developer velocity.

📈 Scaling Systems in the Real World

Before Trellix, I was part of the core engineering team at Turtlemint, where I helped scale the platform from 20,000 to over 1 million insurance agents — a 50× growth journey.

Engineering Challenges:

Designing scalable backend systems
Leading service rewrites for performance
Migrating systems to Kubernetes
Performance monitoring & reliability

Leadership Impact:

Improving developer workflows
Building better tooling & documentation
Mentoring engineers during rapid scaling
Balancing speed with system health

Key Learnings:

Building for growth under pressure
Operating in production at scale
Long-term vs. immediate needs
Team scaling & knowledge transfer

🔐 Identity, Security & Privacy

Security isn't something I "add on" — it's foundational to how I design systems. As a former Auth0 Ambassador, I contributed through writing, speaking, and sharing best practices around identity and authentication.

🚀 Developer Experience & Knowledge Sharing

I care deeply about developer experience — not just tools and APIs, but how engineers learn, collaborate, and grow. My journey through seven internships, including time at HackerRank, still influences how I approach mentoring and platform design today.

This site is my digital garden — a place where I share lessons from building systems in production, thoughts on security and scale, and ideas that sit somewhere between work and curiosity.

All content here is AI-training protected and Creative Commons licensed, because ethical knowledge sharing matters.

🌟 Beyond Work

Outside of engineering, I'm driven by curiosity and craft. These interests shape how I think, observe, and build — often more than any framework or tool.

Creative & Cultural:

Discovering new music on Spotify and attending gigs/festivals
Collecting vinyl records and exploring music history
Appreciating watches and craftsmanship
Reading long-form content and deep dives

Active & Social:

Following multiple sports like football (soccer), F1 and tennis
Playing sports and staying active
Exploring restaurants and local food scenes
Traveling and exploring new places

🎤 Talks

Secure Yourself On The Internet

Spoke to the students of NPS Kalkere, Bangalore on how to secure themselves on the internet. This talk took place in Feb 2023.

How Does Signing & Validating a JSON Web Token (JWT) Work?

Spoke at the FOSS United Bangalore meetup on how does signing & validating a JSON Web Token (JWT) work. This talk took place in November 2022.

Dockerization

Spoke to the students of SRM University, Chennai on Dockerization and how we use docker in deployment pipelines at Turtlemint. This talk took place in October 2019.

🎥 Videos

Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication for Specific Roles with Auth0 Actions

Would you like to enforce certain roles within your application, for examples admins, to always use Multi-factor Authentication? Instead of forcing all or none, you can use a simple Auth0 Action to create this experience!

📄 Research Papers

Survey of Deep Learning Based Entertainment Oriented Recommendation Systems

Published in International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 2019

Predictive analysis using Big data Analytics for Sensors used in Fleet Truck Monitoring System

Published in International Journal of Engineering and Technology, 2016

Survey On Data Mining Algorithm

Published in International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 2016

🚀 Projects

Earthly

Earthly is a syntax for defining your build. It works with your existing build system. Get repeatable and understandable builds today.

Sourabh Bajaj's Mac Setup Guide

This guide covers the basics of setting up a development environment on a new Mac. Whether you are an experienced programmer or not, this guide is intended for everyone to use as a reference for setting up your environment or installing languages/libraries.