Semgrep Hires Veteran Engineering Leader Cathy Polinsky as Co-CTO and VP of Engineering to Secure the Era of AI-Generated Code

Semgrep, a leader in code security for builders, today announced the hire of Cathy Polinsky as Co-CTO and VP of Engineering. Polinsky brings more than two decades of engineering leadership experience at Yahoo!, Salesforce, Stitch Fix, Shopify, and DataGrail, including two prior CTO roles. At a moment when AI-generated code is flooding enterprise codebases faster than security teams can review it, Polinsky joins to scale the engineering organization built to change that.

Foundation AI models have opened new capabilities in security analysis while simultaneously expanding the attack surface for bad actors. Semgrep is at the forefront of addressing the security implications of these models, having been announced earlier this month as one of four companies selected for OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber program. Positioning its engineering team at the frontier of what AI can do for code security at the scale its customers require is the mandate Polinsky was hired to execute.

“I’ve spent over 20 years watching engineering teams balance shipping faster against shipping safely,” said Polinsky. “That tension is only getting harder to manage in the era of AI-generated code. The tools that evaluate whether code is secure need to be independent of the labs building the AI. That’s what drew me to Semgrep. Isaac, Drew, and the team built a developer tool that makes security a native part of how engineers write code, and my job is to make sure the engineering organization scales in a way that preserves everything they’ve built.”

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Polinsky joins Co-founder and Co-CTO Drew Dennison. Semgrep built the two roles to be distinct: Dennison leads technical vision, architectural direction, and AI strategy, while Polinsky leads the engineering organization that executes it. The structure keeps Dennison close to the product and technology while Polinsky scales the team that ships it.

“Bringing Cathy on is one of the most important steps we’ve taken as a company,” said Dennison. “The security problems we’re solving are getting harder and more consequential as AI reshapes how software gets built. Having her lead the engineering organization means I can focus entirely on the technical architecture that keeps Semgrep ahead of what’s coming.”

As the company scales to meet accelerating demand driven by the AI coding transformation, Polinsky will oversee the entire engineering organization across product engineering, security research, TechOps, and technical support. She brings experience scaling technology organizations from early-stage through IPO. She will lead Semgrep’s engineering team through the same transition its customers are navigating: how to build with real security while shipping dramatically faster. This includes the development of Semgrep’s hybrid LLM offering, which combines deterministic static analysis with frontier AI models to find vulnerabilities that neither approach catches alone.

“Semgrep runs more than 100 million scans annually for customers like Okta, Dropbox, Vanta, and Lyft, and the demand for what we build is accelerating,” said Isaac Evans, CEO of Semgrep. “AI-generated code is flooding enterprise codebases faster than security teams can review it, and that creates both urgency and opportunity for Semgrep. We needed an engineering leader who had scaled an organization through exactly this kind of growth before. Cathy has navigated the transition from high-growth to enterprise-scale at some of the most demanding companies in the industry.”

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