WitFoo offers UC student first Christchurch role

WitFoo has offered a Christchurch-based role to a University of Canterbury student whose final-year project it sponsored. The cybersecurity company says it is its first role in Christchurch.

Dylan Costello has been offered a position as Junior Software Engineer after completing one of two WitFoo-backed projects in the University's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. His project focused on designing a way for the company's Analytics platform to run as a coordinated cluster across several machines.

The appointment comes as WitFoo shifts its international commercial operations to Christchurch. It will also expand its support for the University's final-year projects, backing four in 2027 instead of two, and fund a PhD scholarship in computer science expected to begin that year.

Costello said the sponsored project gave him direct exposure to a commercial problem. “Having a project that comes from a real industry challenge helps cement a lot of the concepts taught at UC. Meeting with Charles regularly also helped me better understand the organisational needs and constraints, and the problems I will actually need to solve. I was very lucky to be given this chance, and to receive the offer to continue working with WitFoo in Christchurch. This project has been a great way to finish off my degree,” he said.

The second sponsored student, Matthew Schwartfeger, worked on benchmarking caching and mapping strategies to improve graph processing within the Analytics platform 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,” Schwartfeger said.

A third student, Ben Irvine, was not part of the formal sponsorship programme but used WitFoo's open data for his work. He evaluated research provenance-graph intrusion detection systems on the Precinct 6 Cybersecurity Dataset, which WitFoo developed with the University's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

“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,” Irvine said.

Deeper Ties

WitFoo first attended the University's final-year project showcase as a guest in 2025 and sponsored its first two projects this year. Its expanded commitment signals a broader relationship with the institution as it builds a presence in Christchurch.

Charles Herring, Chairman and Co-Founder of WitFoo, linked that expansion to the students' work and the University's teaching. “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.

Academic staff involved said the projects show the value of industry-backed work in final-year study. Associate Professor Etienne Borde, who coordinates the department's software engineering research projects course with industry, said the arrangement gave students exposure to practical problems as well as technical development.

“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,” Borde said.

Cross-Faculty Work

The collaboration has also extended beyond computer science. Following an introduction from Borde, WitFoo and Dr Chat Le Nguyen from the University's Faculty of Law have begun exploring research into legal questions that arise when organisations share cybersecurity evidence, including privacy issues and the use of machine-generated evidence by Police and the courts.

The move has also drawn support from ChristchurchNZ, the city's economic development agency, which pointed to the combination of university research, student hiring and inward business activity. WitFoo's New Zealand subsidiary is based in central Christchurch, where it is building its international commercial operations.

Martin Cudd, General Manager of Innovation and Business Growth at ChristchurchNZ, said the outcome reflected the type of connection the city wants between companies and the local university. “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,” Cudd said.