Zhen Lian

About Zhen Lian

Security and infrastructure software engineer with 8+ years at Block, Google, and Yahoo, spanning open-source communities, cloud and on-prem environments, and enterprise platforms. Deep expertise in identity and access management, public key infrastructure, and network security — from architecting large-scale platform migrations to securing AI/ML infrastructure. Startup co-founder. Seeking staff or senior-level opportunities.

Experience

1. Senior Software Security Engineer

   Block

   Apr 2023 — Present

   Agentic Birthright Access Automation- Proposal & Design: Conceived and co-led building an agentic access automation platform for Block\'s largest IAM system — architecting monitoring, discovery, and lifecycle agents that sync Workday signals to grant same-day birthright access and automate renewal- Impact: 90% complete, entering production. Projected to eliminate ~40% of annual access request effort. Highlighted by leadership across multiple all-hands.Legacy IAM Modernization & AWS Migration- End-to-end execution: Architected and led a multi-year effort to modernize Block\'s largest IAM system — a 15-year-old monolith — into managed Kubernetes on AWS, selecting services by access pattern, latency, and cost tradeoffs- Cross-team unblocking: Resolved a circular dependency via an S3-based decoupling layer — now the internal standard for cross-team dependency resolution- Impact: 43.7% p99 and 23.1% p50 latency reduction, 29% cost savings, zero major incidents. Presented to 700+ engineers at Foundational Engineering Org all-hands. Next-Gen Identity Platform for Analytics & ML workloads- Technical Leadership: Led Block\'s next-gen identity lifecycle platform for analytics (Snowflake, Databricks) and LLM training/inference. Coordinated cross-functionally with Block\'s AiDA team- Credential Elimination: Eliminated 30% of static credentials across ML and agentic workloads by building a dynamic token issuance service on AWS-native primitives- Identity Delegation: Co-proposed a delegation system for ML researchers to run extended workloads with data-plane ACLs tied to workload initiators. Leadership & Open Source- Mentorship: Security domain expert for Block\'s IAM services; design reviewer for 3 adjacent teams. Mentored 3 engineers and 1 intern; intern presented directly to Block\'s CEO- Open Source: Contributed security features to Block\'s AI agent Goose (https://github.com/block/goose): MCP hardening, container isolation, and secret protection.

Education

• UC San Diego

  Master of Science (MS), Computer Science

  2016 — 2018

• Wuhan University of Technology

  Bachelor's degree, Computer Science

  2012 — 2016

Skills

• Java
• Arduino
• Javascript
• Python
• Latex
• Bootstrap
• Hbase
• Jquery
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Junit
• Jmeter
• Sql
• Restful Webservices
• Linux
• Machine Learning
• Html
• Bash
• Maven
• Nunjucks
• Node.js
• Hashkell
• Hadoop
• Matlab
• Visual Studio
• Mysql
• Spring Mvc
• Koa
• Sqlite
• Spark
• Haskell
• Rabbitmq
• Resteasy
• Mongodb
• Jmockit
• Redis
• Cucumber
• Hive
• C++
• Vue
• J2ee Web Services