WitFoo offers first Christchurch role to UC student, doubles project sponsorship

The cybersecurity company will sponsor four UC final-year projects in 2027, up from two, and has committed to fund a PhD scholarship in computer science

CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND, October 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) student whose final-year project WitFoo sponsored has been offered a role as the cybersecurity company's first Christchurch-based employee.

Dylan Costello's project, one of two WitFoo sponsored this year in UC's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, designed a way for the company's Analytics platform to run as a coordinated cluster across several machines. The offer, for a Junior Software Engineer role with WitFoo Limited, comes as WitFoo moves its international commercial operations to Christchurch.

"Christchurch has been the Garden City for more than a century. I believe it is in a great position to become a garden city of innovation that could one day compete with Silicon Valley, and the potential to get there already exists inside the University of Canterbury," WitFoo Chairman and co-Founder Charles Herring said.

"Having a project that comes from a real industry challenge helps cement a lot of the concepts taught at UC, while meeting with Charles regularly allowed me to better understand the organisational needs and constraints, and what problems I will actually need to solve. I was very lucky to be given this chance, and for the offer to continue working with WitFoo in Christchurch. This project has been a great way to finish off my degree," said Costello.

Matthew Schwartfeger, WitFoo's second sponsored student, benchmarked caching and mapping strategies to speed up the graph processing at the heart of Analytics while keeping memory use predictable.

"This project has been a good opportunity to take performance optimisation beyond a single algorithm and look at how it applies to a larger system. It's been interesting to see how choices around caching and mapping strategies affect both performance and memory usage in a real production application," said Schwartfeger.

A third student, Ben Irvine, worked from WitFoo's open data rather than a sponsorship, evaluating research provenance-graph intrusion detection systems on the Precinct 6 Cybersecurity Dataset, which WitFoo produced in collaboration with UC's Computer Science and Software Engineering department.

"Over the project I suggested ways the dataset could better reflect the environments these systems would actually run in, including having attacks sit naturally among the normal activity around them. WitFoo checked and acted on every suggestion, rebuilding the dataset and making it possible to evaluate these systems on real operational data," said Irvine.

"Real industry problems, with real code, real data, and real stakeholders, give students an authentic experience. This year's projects show what our students can achieve, and the benefit flows both ways and extends beyond the technical results of each project," said Associate Professor Etienne Borde, who coordinates the department's software engineering research projects course with industry.

WitFoo first attended the showcase as a guest in 2025 and sponsored its first two projects this year. It will sponsor four in 2027 and has committed to fund a PhD scholarship in computer science at UC, expected to begin in 2027.

"The work Dylan, Matthew and Ben delivered would hold its own in any engineering team I have led. That is a credit to them, and to the UC academics who gave them rigour, room and real support. It is why we are doubling our commitment," Herring said.

The collaboration has also crossed faculty lines. Following an introduction from Borde, WitFoo and Dr Chat Le Nguyen of UC's Te Kaupeka Ture | Faculty of Law have begun exploring interdisciplinary research into the legal questions raised when organisations share cybersecurity evidence, from privacy to how machine-generated evidence is used by Police and the courts.

"Christchurch's tech sector grows when our university and our companies work this closely together. When a UC student's final-year project turns into a job offer from a company that has chosen to move here, that is exactly the story Ōtautahi wants to tell," said Martin Cudd, General Manager of Innovation and Business Growth at ChristchurchNZ, the city's economic development agency.

Media invitation
Media are invited to the UC CSSE Final Year Project Showcase 2026 on Friday 16 October, 9am to 6pm, at Novotel Christchurch Cathedral Square. Irvine presents at 10:30am, and Costello and Schwartfeger from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. For interviews with Herring, contact press@witfoo.com; for UC staff and students, contact UC Media at media@canterbury.ac.nz.

About WitFoo
WitFoo builds security operations software that reads all of an organisation's security data, reduces telemetry volumes by more than 90% without losing evidence, and shares what it finds with the people who must act on it, from analysts and boards to law enforcement. Founded in 2016, WitFoo, Inc. is headquartered in Dunwoody, Georgia, and sells its Conductor, Analytics and Reporter products through channel partners. Its New Zealand subsidiary, WitFoo Limited, is based at 47 Salisbury Street in Christchurch Central, where the company is building its international commercial operations. Cybersecurity for Collective Defense.

About the University of Canterbury
Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC), established in 1873, is a research university in Christchurch. Its Te Tari Pūhanga Pūmanawa Rorohiko | Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering conducts research across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, software engineering and human-computer interaction.

Working with UC gives our partners access to new thinking, advanced research, nationally benchmarked infrastructure and exceptional talent. Whether companies are tackling complex challenges, exploring new opportunities, or shaping the future of their sector, UC makes it easy to link directly to expertise and capabilities via our new Research Connect portal.

Michael Riforgiate
WitFoo, Inc.
+1 678-203-9800
press@witfoo.com
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