Obsidian Security Strengthens Engineering Team To Drive SaaS Security Innovation

By AIT News Desk On Jun 2, 2022

The leaders bring talent from Google, Apple and Palo Alto Networks to help bolster the company’s engineering and R&D teams

Obsidian Security, the leader in SaaS security and posture management (SSPM), announced four new senior hires on its engineering team: Zhiping Liu as Senior Principal Engineering Lead, Shuyang Wang, Head of Threat Research, Phil Whyte, Senior Director of Engineering and Autumn Wang, Director of DevOps. The key hires build on Obsidian’s mantra of relentless innovation and bring with them world-class security engineering expertise from leading organizations such as Apple, Google, Palo Alto Networks and GCHQ. These additions strengthen the product development team led by Glenn Chisholm, co-founder and CPO and Xinran Wang, EVP of Engineering. This announcement follows Obsidian’s official certification as a Great Place to Work from just earlier in May.

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“Having built world-class engineering teams at Palo Alto Networks and Shape Security, it’s exciting to bring such high caliber individuals onto the team to drive our product innovation”

Recently appointed, EVP of Engineering Xinran Wang is quickly making headway in doubling the size of the engineering team. Ms. Zhiping Liu has more than 20 years of threat engineering experience, starting at the University of Science and Technology of China at the age of fifteen where she became an expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP). She also holds Masters in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University. Before joining Obsidian, she was head of threat engineering at vArmour and prior to that she was at Palo Alto Networks where she contributed to the development of PANOS and Wildfire as a senior software architect. Shuyang Wang comes to Obsidian from Google, where he was a lead senior security engineer with broad responsibilities across product, acquisition and offensive security. Mr. Wang has deep threat research experience and led red teaming simulations and pentest programs focused on web services. Prior to Google he spent four years as a security engineer at Apple focused on IOS and MacOS kernel security.

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Phil Whyte will build and lead the Obsidian R&D hub in the United Kingdom. He previously served as the Senior Director of Engineering at Synack, and before that worked as a security researcher for GCHQ in the United Kingdom. Lastly, Autumn Wang brings extensive experience in security focused DevOps through his work at Palo Alto Networks, where he scaled DevOps and Site Reliability for the Okyo product from scratch to support hundreds of million in cloud services revenue. Prior to Palo Alto, Autumn held DevOps and Principal engineering roles at Illumio, Autodesk and Salesforce.

“Having built world-class engineering teams at Palo Alto Networks and Shape Security, it’s exciting to bring such high caliber individuals onto the team to drive our product innovation,” said Xinran Wang, EVP of Engineering. “Obsidian has given me a platform to build a best-in-class SaaS security solution and these four engineering leaders with incredible track records of success and expertise are a crucial step towards achieving our goals.”

“Great companies are built on great products. I’m excited and humbled to have Zhiping, Shuyang, Phil and Autumn bring their immense talent and expertise to Obsidian.” said Hasan Imam, CEO of Obsidian. “It will allow us to continue innovating rapidly at an even greater scale, and help us achieve our goal of helping organizations bridge security and compliance gaps in business-critical SaaS applications.”

All four senior engineers bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the company and will help Obsidian Security achieve its goal of delivering a category-defining solution in SaaS security.

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