I’m Stuart Lane. Everyone calls me Stu. I’m the Director of Application Security at Penguin Random House, where I lead the global AppSec program across hundreds of applications. I got here the long way around, and I think the detour is the point.

My story

I failed out of college three times. In 2013 I joined the US Navy and spent four years as an aviation meteorologist, forecasting weather for Navy pilots around the world. That job was reading risk early and calling it clearly. So is this one.

When I left the military for tech, my chief told me I’d only ever be a mailman. Instead, I finished a cybersecurity degree with straight A’s while TA-ing Calculus, and landed my first application security job before graduation. In 2022, the same year my third child was born, I joined Penguin Random House as a Senior AppSec Engineer. Four years and three promotions later, I run the program.

How I lead

My whole approach fits in one sentence: empower development teams to build secure solutions without slowing them down. For me that starts with developer empathy. I build real relationships with the teams that ship, show up early in design conversations, and make the secure path the easy path. Guardrails over gates, every time. And I stay close to the code: the merge request security bot, the ASPM pipelines, and the threat-register MCP server all started as code I wrote.

Off the clock I’m a father of four, and the thing I care about most at work and at home is the same thing: teaching people to think critically. Question the screen, check the source, and respect a perspective you don’t share.

Where I add value

• Application security strategy and program leadership at global scale.
• AI security: model reviews, agentic tooling and MCP security, guardrails in AWS Bedrock.
• Security automation: bots, ASPM, and pipelines that give developers their time back.
• Threat modeling and secure design: STRIDE sessions that fit in an hour, not a week.