Matt Anderson
My name is Matt Anderson and I’m an Engineering Manager at Expanse, a cybersecurity startup that is indexing the entire global internet to defend some of the world’s most important organizations. I focus on systems that mine big and streaming datasets, and I take a particular interest in the security, privacy, and openness of the internet.
Outside of work, I enjoy exploring the mountains, rivers, lakes, deserts, and coastline of the Western United States, as well as the small towns that lie between them. During the summer of 2015, I hiked more than 1,000 miles southbound along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and have increased my PCT mileage to 1,330 in the summers since. I’ve visited every National Park in Washington, Oregon, and California, and am constantly in search of the next beautiful place to visit.
🏔️ 🌲 🌊 🐻 🌵 🍁
MS in Computer Science, 2015
Stanford University
BS in Computer Science, 2014
Stanford University
High School, 2010
Newport High School in Bellevue, WA
Since October 2017, I’ve managed engineers working on a variety of platform capabilities, including collection of the data that comprise the Expanse Global Internet Sensing Platform (these include passive and active DNS, WHOIS, BGP, scanning, and flow data) and mining these data to link organizations to their internet-connected assets. Together, these capabilities help Expanse’s customers discover, track, and impose security policies over their internet-connected assets, all without installing a single agent or appliance.
We use Apache Beam (our pipelines are written in Java and run on Google Cloud Dataflow) for batch and stream processing, moving data in and out of Google Cloud Storage, Apache Kafka, Google Cloud Bigtable (HBase), Elasticsearch, and Postgres (Amazon RDS). Our streaming pipelines are built to handle tens of thousands of messages per second, and routinely process more than 5 TB per day. Our total data size is in the petabytes. Most of our APIs are running a (Java) Spring Boot stack, but our data collection team has authored a number of services written in Go.
Met with agency principals, conducted research, and coordinated efforts to roll out the President’s open data and open government initiatives, particularly as they related to public safety data. Made detailed technical plans to improve the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s product recalls API. Created a Codecademy course to promote usage of the NHTSA 5-star safety data API. Reviewed an unclassified interagency report on cybersecurity research.
Concurrently, I was enrolled in the Bing Stanford in Washington program.