# Jon Zeolla

> Founder of Zenable, Agentic AI Foundation Ambassador, self-described AI Janitor. I’m on a mission to make AI Correct, Observable, and Conformant. Builds verifiers for software (twenty years; machine learning since 2015; exclusively for coding agents since 2023) and teaches engineers to build their own.

Jon Zeolla is based in Pittsburgh, PA. In his day job at Zenable he builds managed, self-improving verifiers that mold themselves to a company's unique requirements. In his classes he teaches engineers how to do the same. He speaks at SANS, CSA, ISACA, BSides, DevOpsDays, KubeCon, and CloudNativeSecurityCon, and runs private hands-on workshops for engineering teams.

## Contact and profiles

- [Talk to Jon](https://zenable.io/jon): book time for talks, workshops, or a strategy session
- [Resume](https://jonzeolla.com/resume.pdf): one-page PDF
- [GitHub](https://github.com/jonzeolla)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/jonzeolla)
- [X](https://twitter.com/jonzeolla)
- [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDvTIewuIyaKK2wk49iq5_rxUcNioSr0y): recorded talks

## Speaking

- [All talks, classes, and podcasts](https://jonzeolla.com/talks.html): 83 talks, 61 classes, 24 podcasts since 2011, with Watch and Slides links
- [Slides (monopreso)](https://github.com/JonZeolla/monopreso): source for most recent decks
- Recent recordings: Behind the Numbers (with Matthew Coombs) (Behind the Numbers, 2026), Your Developers' AI Code Looks Perfect — Until It Hits Production (with Fin Barker) (The Sunny Side, 2026), The Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic Voting, & Treating GRC Like a Product (Anti-Checkbox Podcast, 2026), AI Chats w/ Zenable and OpenArc (Seiso Side-up Podcast, 2026)

## Teaching

1,200+ engineers taught live (in person or live online; recordings not counted), across 61 classes since 2013. Instructor for SANS SEC540 and SEC545; private AI-Native Software Development workshops for engineering teams.

## Hands-on labs

31 labs, more than 40 hours of hands-on content, run as private workshops for engineering teams. Modules:

- Context Engineering for Coding Agents: Context files, Prompting, Spec-driven development, Skills, DSPy, GEPA
- Hooks, Guardrails & Policy as Code: Hooks, Self-validating loops, Requirements, Output validation, Zenable
- MCP, Agent Protocols & Identity: MCP, OAuth 2.1, agentgateway, A2A, ACP, DPoP, AAuth
- Runtime Observability & Sandboxing: Telemetry, seccomp, eBPF, Tetragon, Landlock
- Formal Verification & Typed Evals: Lean, Typed questions, Model routing, Refactoring
- Agent Teams & Orchestration: Agent teams, Improvement flywheel, Orchestrators, Gastown, LSP
- Inside the Model: Refusal, Embeddings, LoRA, An LLM from scratch

Public lab environments: https://github.com/Zenable-io/labs

## Background

- Founder & CEO, Zenable (2023–)
- Agentic AI Foundation Ambassador, inaugural cohort (2026–)
- SANS Certified Instructor, SEC540 and SEC545 (2022–); IANS faculty
- CNCF TAG Security member (2020–2026); CNCF Ambassador (2023–2026)
- Co-founder & CTO, Seiso, sold in 2026 (2017–2026)
- Principal Information Security Engineer, Carnegie Mellon University (2014–2020)
- Apache Software Foundation committer, Apache Metron (2017–)