California’s video game industry runs on always-on platforms, global player communities, digital commerce, live service operations, and increasingly complex security demands. The leaders in this feature reflect that reality. Their backgrounds span enterprise IT, application security, infrastructure security, governance and compliance, platform engineering, and risk management inside companies that help shape how games are built, distributed, and operated at scale. Together, they offer a strong cross-section of the executives and security leaders helping protect one of California’s most influential entertainment and technology sectors.
Christopher Hymes — Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Head of Enterprise IT, Riot Games
Christopher Hymes serves as chief information security officer and head of enterprise IT at Riot Games, where he leads security and enterprise technology efforts for a company serving more than 100 million players worldwide. His role sits at the center of both cyber risk management and operational resilience, reflecting how security leadership in gaming increasingly overlaps with platform scale, business enablement, and enterprise transformation. Before Riot, he led information security and enterprise IT at Hulu during a period of major business evolution, supporting payment security, content security requirements, and international growth. Earlier roles at JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Protiviti added grounding in application security, information risk management, and consulting, giving him a background that blends financial-sector discipline with high-growth consumer technology experience.
Jason Lee — Senior Director, Gaming Governance Risk and Compliance, Activision Blizzard
Jason Lee is senior director of gaming governance, risk, and compliance at Activision Blizzard, where he focuses on enterprise vulnerability management, annual security risk assessment, aggregated risk reporting, and strategic remediation planning. His profile stands out because it represents the governance and risk side of cybersecurity leadership in gaming, an area that becomes increasingly important as major publishers manage sprawling global environments, regulatory expectations, and cross-functional remediation efforts. Before joining Activision Blizzard, he held senior information security leadership roles at OnSolve, BluJay Solutions, and Verizon Connect, where he built and matured global security programs, compliance capabilities, customer trust functions, and security operations. That experience gives him a strong mix of GRC depth, operational security understanding, and large-enterprise program building that fits the needs of a complex gaming organization.
Jessica Wakefield — VP Engineering & Information Security, PlayStation
Jessica Wakefield is vice president of engineering and information security at PlayStation, where she operates at the intersection of global platform engineering, identity, commerce, payments, and information security for one of the biggest gaming ecosystems in the world. Her scope has included end-to-end engineering and operational strategy for PlayStation Network domains such as account, identity, commerce, transactional notifications, and digital rights management, alongside large-scale modernization work that moved major systems from legacy architectures to cloud-based services. Her career before PlayStation included senior engineering leadership roles at Intuit and earlier work at Capital One, giving her a long track record in platform transformation, customer experience, and engineering execution. In the context of gaming, that combination of engineering leadership and security responsibility makes her especially notable, because platform trust, account protection, and commerce resilience are central to the business.
Shawna Murphy Butterworth — Head of Infrastructure Security, Roblox
Shawna Murphy Butterworth leads infrastructure security at Roblox, where her responsibilities include network security, cloud security, production IAM, PKI, secrets management, data center security, infrastructure security, and AI security at scale. Her role reflects the technical depth required to secure a platform-driven gaming company whose environment depends heavily on resilient infrastructure and secure engineering foundations. Before Roblox, she held leadership roles at GitHub, where she led secure access engineering and earlier transformed the security operations team into a more engineering-centric organization. Her longer background at Wells Fargo included work across digital channel security, security operations, secure software development lifecycle programs, DDoS, and identity and access management. That progression gives her a strong operational and engineering-led security profile that is highly relevant in a gaming environment where infrastructure and platform trust are inseparable.
Security leadership across California’s gaming platforms and publishers
California’s video game sector depends on security leaders who can support both technical scale and player trust. The executives and senior leaders in this feature show how the industry now requires a wide mix of capabilities, from enterprise IT and platform engineering to governance, infrastructure security, and operational resilience. As gaming companies continue to expand live services, digital commerce, and cloud-native platforms, the people leading those efforts from the security side will remain central to how the industry grows.
Explore more profiles of the leaders shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our CISOs to Watch collection.