Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting members of the Seattle tech community about a passion or hobby they pursue outside of work.
Name: Dan Rico.
Day job: Senior security engineer at Truveta, the Seattle-area health data company, where Rico helps run the Incident Response and Threat Management team, building detections and securing personal patient data against cyberattacks.
Out-of-office passion: Building and racing remote-control cars.
Growing up in New York, Rico credits his father with the career path he took in tech and with the hobby that now consumes his free time.
Rico’s dad was a Microsoft Certified technician, which was a big deal in the IT world in the 1990s during the explosive growth of PCs and networking. Growing up in New York, Rico remembers seeing the stress of engineering, the long nights and late-night troubleshooting calls. And he remembers his dad’s need to disconnect on weekends.
“He chose model airplanes and building them from scratch,” Rico said of his father. “It fascinated me, because I saw how he was able to truly separate himself from work, yet there was a clear parallel. It’s still engineering, there’s still design, there’s still the tedious processes, and it’s very time consuming.”
Rico took a job at a hobby shop in New York City around age 13, and his love for RC planes, helicopters and cars took off. As a teenager, he had a room full of the toys.
When he moved to the Seattle area five years ago to work at Truveta, he reignited a hobby that he’d lost touch with during college and after. He was at the 15-year mark in a career that comes with its share of stresses, and he was looking for an escape.
“I love engineering, but you need something to really separate your life and break it up,” he said.
RC racing in 2025 is a serious sport. It’s not like the days of battery-operated cars and controllers with a radio antenna that provided connectivity. Rico races 1/10 and 1/8 scale stock cars, both nitro and electric-powered, that can hit speeds of 60 mph.
He predominantly hangs out at Die Hard RC Park in Snohomish, Wash., where he takes part in indoor and outdoor races on a variety of tracks. He’s even gotten into helping design and build tracks.
An avid PC gamer who has always built his own computers, Rico appreciates the physicality of RC cars and feeling a connection to the machine — or not feeling it. He thrives on the frustration and the time crunch of fixing a problem.
“At the end of the day, if the race went poorly it’s a reflection of how I performed,” Rico said. “It’s a great way to [measure] how calm I’m being, how effective I can be. A lot of those things that I learn in racing I’m able to bring back into incident response.”
Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Rico isn’t obsessed with winning or making it onto the podium after a race. There’s no ego involved, and he gets as much enjoyment out of meeting other racers and helping on their “pit crew” as he does racing himself.
“Since I joined I have pitted for over 15 people who I never met before,” he said. “Every time that happened it’s instantly a new friend, a new connection.”
He also enjoys helping others get into racing or improve their technique through the Drive Like a Girl program. That sense of community and supportive atmosphere is reminiscent of his cybersecurity work.
“One of the things that I basically agreed to do when becoming a professional in cyber is constantly mentor, constantly stay on top of things and keep others apprised of updates,” Rico said. “It’s very similar to the RC side.”
The lessons he brings back to work: Rico’s hobby not only helps him disconnect from the stress of security work, but also sharpens his professional skills. He sees a clear parallel between keeping a race car running perfectly and preventing a cyberattack.
“There’s all these little knobs, essentially, in both security and the racing that need to constantly be tweaked and watched,” he said. “It’s almost like incident response without actually responding to incidents. It’s just my car.”
Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: [email protected].
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