California’s software industry remains one of the most influential centers of cybersecurity leadership anywhere in the world. The executives in this feature are leading security programs inside companies that shape identity, data movement, collaboration, travel, compliance, enterprise software, and cloud platforms at global scale. Their backgrounds span product security, engineering, cloud security, compliance, crisis response, privacy, identity, and large enterprise transformation.
David Bradbury — Chief Security Officer, Okta
David Bradbury is executive vice president and chief security officer at Okta, where he leads overall security execution for the organization and helps guide customers as they accelerate zero trust strategies. He has held the role since 2020, following senior security leadership positions at Symantec, Commonwealth Bank, NBN Co, MSCI, Barclays Capital, ABN AMRO, and IBM. His career spans global banking and enterprise technology, with experience across cyber security operations, identity and access, information risk, and large-scale security leadership. Earlier in his career, he also worked as a software engineer at eBay.
Tom Conklin — Chief Information Security Officer, Fivetran
Tom Conklin is chief information security officer at Fivetran, where he leads global security and compliance. His background is rooted in building and scaling security programs for SaaS companies, with experience across cloud security, privacy, compliance, and enterprise customer assurance. Before joining Fivetran in 2020, he served as chief information security officer at Druva and held senior security and compliance leadership roles at Vera Security, where he built the security program from the ground up for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and Privacy Shield. Earlier roles at Zuora, Xoom, and Frank Rimerman + Co. added deep experience in audits, internal controls, disaster recovery testing, compliance certifications, and security program development.
Kyle Randolph — Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President of Engineering, Verkada
Kyle Randolph is chief information security officer and vice president of engineering at Verkada. He previously served as chief information security officer and vice president of security, privacy, compliance, and assurance at Optimizely, where he was the first security hire and built the company’s security, privacy, and compliance organization from the ground up. His work there included creating governance structures, building ISO 27001, SOC 2, and PCI compliance programs, establishing a company-wide privacy program for GDPR and CCPA, and expanding the team across software security, corporate security, privacy, and compliance. Earlier in his career, he led account security engineering at Twitter, supported secure software development at Adobe, and led product security work at Citrix.
Frank Stehberger — Chief Information Security Officer, Corel Corporation
Frank Stehberger is chief information security officer at Corel Corporation and has also held the same title at Parallels since 2023. Before that, he spent more than seven years at OpenTable, including as director of information security and principal information security lead. His earlier career included principal security work at Broadcom, enterprise security engineering at HID Global, and IT security engineering and implementation leadership at Bosch Siemens Home Appliances. His background reflects long-running experience across enterprise security programs, network security, infrastructure implementation, cloud security knowledge, and secure systems design.
Mark Carter — Chief Information Security Officer, Navan
Mark Carter is chief information security officer at Navan, where he is responsible for security, risk, compliance, fraud management and prevention, software engineering, artificial intelligence development, product security, and global cyber security for the company’s travel and expense platform. Before joining Navan in 2024, he served as chief information security officer and chief information officer at Vimeo, leading teams across product security, application security, security operations, governance and compliance, privacy, cloud security, incident response, enterprise systems, and artificial intelligence implementation. His earlier senior leadership roles include Salesforce, Amazon, Tesla, Google, PayPal, VMware, Wave Systems, Gemalto, Verint, Microsoft, and Netvision. Across those roles, he led security, engineering, cloud, big data, machine learning, observability, compliance, and large-scale platform operations.
Akshay Shetty — Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, Guidewire Software
Akshay Shetty is vice president and deputy chief information security officer at Guidewire Software. He joined Guidewire after leading security strategy and program work at Salesforce, where he managed large security assurance teams responsible for secure software development lifecycle programs, marketplace security, bug bounty, vulnerability management, and enterprise security initiatives. Earlier, at Autodesk, he led the company’s security awareness program, helped drive identity and access management strategy, and designed a risk-based policy exception management process. His prior work at PwC and Mycroft added experience in privileged access management, incident response planning, web access management, cloud identity solutions, multi-factor authentication, and governance, risk, and compliance implementation.
California’s Software Security Leaders Reflect the Industry’s Breadth
The cybersecurity leaders in California’s software industry are operating at the intersection of product development, cloud infrastructure, compliance, identity, privacy, and enterprise resilience. Their backgrounds show how deeply security leadership is embedded in the software sector, from growth-stage SaaS companies to some of the best-known enterprise technology brands in the world.
Explore more profiles of the leaders shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our CISOs to Watch collection.