GitHub Identity Resolution

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What GitHub identity resolution is

GitHub identity resolution is the process of mapping a GitHub username to a verified professional identity — LinkedIn profile, current employer, title, and work email — with high precision.

It’s the technical answer to a common GTM problem: you have developer signals (stars, forks, PRs, issues) but you don’t know who the humans are behind them.

The LeadCognition approach: multi-stage identity validation

Most enrichment APIs run name matching against a database. LeadCognition runs identity confirmation.

The difference: a name match finds a LinkedIn profile that could be the right person. Identity confirmation validates it IS the right person.

Stage 1 — Signal extraction

Extract all available identity signals from the GitHub profile: username structure, display name, bio text, company field, location, linked URLs, commit email patterns (without requiring a public email), language stack, contribution graph shape.

Stage 2 — Candidate resolution

Cross-reference extracted signals against enrichment databases to surface LinkedIn profile candidates. Signals are weighted by reliability — company mention outweighs location; commit email pattern outweighs bio text.

Stage 3 — Identity confirmation

Validate each candidate against:

• Career trajectory (does their professional history make sense for their GitHub activity?)
• Professional context (does their industry match their technology stack?)
• Industry signals (are they a developer, or a politician/lawyer/journalist who happens to share a name?)

Same-name collisions — the core failure mode of naive resolvers — are eliminated at this stage.

If confidence falls below threshold: no result returned, no charge.

Why same-name collision engineering matters

Consider a GitHub user @alexjohnson. Naive name matching might return a LinkedIn profile for “Alex Johnson, Personal Injury Lawyer.” Sending an outbound email about your DevTool API to a lawyer is worse than not sending anything — it damages your brand and wastes your SDR’s time.

LeadCognition’s career trajectory and industry signal validation catches these collisions. A lawyer named Alex Johnson will not have a TypeScript-heavy commit history. A developer named Alex Johnson working at a fintech startup won’t have a political consulting background on LinkedIn.

This is why our precision is 90%+ — not 60% like naive enrichment APIs.

API

curl -X POST https://app.leadcognition.io/api/v1/deanon \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LEADCOGNITION_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"githubUser": "torvalds", "includeDossier": false}'

Response:

{
  "github_user": "torvalds",
  "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/...",
  "status": "found",
  "credits_charged": 2,
  "credits_remaining": 48
}

Set includeDossier: true to attach a full developer dossier for +1 credit, or post to /api/v1/deanon/batch for up to 50 handles at once.

Full API docs →

Pricing

What you send	What you get	Credits
GitHub handle	LinkedIn profile URL + name + company	2 credits
GitHub handle + a work email you already hold	Same, resolved via the email→name path	3 credits
Either, with the dossier toggle on	Adds a full developer dossier	+1 credit
Anything below the confidence threshold	Nothing returned	0 credits

The work email is an input signal, not an output — returning a verified work email is a separate enrichment step and requires a paid plan. Free tier: 50 credits, no credit card, resolving LinkedIn, name and company.

See pricing → Start Free →

Use cases

GitHub signal → outbound contact — Every new star/fork on your repo triggers identity resolution. Enriched contact with LinkedIn + email lands in your CRM automatically — see GitHub profile enrichment for the CRM and sequencing side.

Stargazer list enrichment — Upload your historical GitHub stargazer list. Resolve identities in batch. Turn 3 years of GitHub signals into a prioritized outbound queue.

Contributor profiling — Identify the professional identities of open-source contributors in your category. Know who’s building in your space before they reach out to you.

ICP scoring — After resolution, score the developer against your ICP: company size, industry, title seniority, tech stack. Filter for qualified leads before any outreach.

Frequently Asked Questions