About Zachary Gruenberg

👋 Hi, I'm Zach. I've never stayed in one lane. I'm an engineer with an MBA who advises on early-stage startups and runs a nine-node Kubernetes cluster at home for fun. Curiosity turned into a career. Today I'm a Solution Architect at Cyera, focused on non-human identity and agentic access management: securing the machine identities and AI agents that now outnumber people. Before that I was the first AI SME at CyberArk, then Palo Alto Networks and Oasis Security. I work where identity, cloud-native DevOps, secrets and AI agents meet, where the hardest security problems live right now. Outside work, I advise a family investment office, speak at conferences like LLMDay NYC, and tinker in my homelab. The rest goes to my wife and our twins, and I protect that time most. So how did I get here? I kept building. Reading about tech and fixing it at 2 AM are different kinds of knowledge, and the second gets you in the room. My GitHub has a local RAG API (FastAPI, ChromaDB, Ollama), an Azure OpenAI gateway, a five-agent Kubernetes SRE pipeline on kagent and Bedrock, and work on locking down AI agent secrets with Conjur. An agent is only as trustworthy as its credentials. NextWork is where a lot of that started. When the platform had no dark mode, I built nextwork-dark, and other learners started using it. That's the loop I love: build for yourself, share it, help someone else. That's why I started NextWork Build and Brew, a learning group for everyone from CS undergrads to career-changers who've never opened a terminal. We build, share what broke, and learn out loud. AI moves too fast to learn alone. Grab a coffee and build with us. ☕ Principles I keep coming back to. 👇 🔨 Build it to understand it. Diagrams are theories. A running system is the truth. 🔐 Trust is the product. Every agent, token and pipeline is only as good as the identity behind it. Least privilege isn't a checkbox. It's a design philosophy. ♟️ Think a few moves ahead. Chess taught me this before tech did. Don't just fix today's problem. Prevent next year's. 🧩 Scratch your own itch. Small tools you use beat big projects you never finish. 🎓 Stay a beginner somewhere. If you're the smartest in every room, find new rooms. 🤝 Teach what you just learned. You don't need to be an expert, just one step ahead and willing to share. I'm not at the end of this road, and I'd rather walk it with people than alone. Whether you're breaking into tech, securing AI in production, or building something new, let's connect. 🤝 🧭 The tech changes every six months. The habit of building doesn't. 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zag23 💻 GitHub: https://github.com/ZAG23