Six CISOs make up this list, and no two got here the same way. One has held his current title for less than a year. Another leaves onsemi this year after two decades split across engineering, aerospace, entertainment, and semiconductor companies. What connects them is not seniority but the specific problem each one was hired to solve, whether that meant absorbing a $10 billion company into an existing security program, restoring merchant confidence after a payments breach, or standing up a security operations center from nothing to cover 120,000 employee desktops.
Brandon Young – VP, CISO, Republic Services
Brandon Young built Honeywell’s Global Security Operations Center from the ground up between 2004 and 2007, standing up a tiered incident response model that eventually covered 120,000 employee desktops, more than 10,000 servers, and the company’s global network infrastructure on a $2.961 million operating budget. That buildout came in the middle of a fifteen-year run at Honeywell that took him from risk management lead through IT audit and business intelligence to senior director of risk assurance, reporting to the corporate CIO. Young left Honeywell in 2016 for Charles Schwab, where he worked as Managing Director of Cybersecurity Framework and Risk Assessment in Phoenix, then became CISO at Avnet in 2019. He has held the VP and CISO title at Republic Services since October 2021, based in Arizona.
Robert Wahl – VP, Global CISO and IT Infrastructure, Circle K
Robert Wahl has sat on the board of Wahl Clipper Corporation since 2017, serving on its audit committee alongside a full-time security career that has run through pet retail, food processing, and now convenience retail. His earliest security role traces back to Walter Industries in Tampa, where he led information security and IT compliance starting in 2002. He spent six years managing IS Security Operations at PetSmart in the Greater Phoenix Area, then moved to Tyson Foods in Springdale, Arkansas as Director and CISO in 2014. In 2016 he returned to PetSmart as VP and CISO, a role he held for eight years before Harley-Davidson recruited him as Chief Information Security and Privacy Officer in June 2024. He moved to Circle K in October 2025 as VP, Global CISO and IT Infrastructure, based in Tempe.
Stephen McMaster – Chief Information Security Officer, Western Alliance Bancorporation
Stephen McMaster spent 24 years at Wells Fargo before taking the CISO title at Western Alliance Bank in November 2025, based in Chandler. His last Wells Fargo role put him in charge of cloud security strategy, data loss prevention, third-party cyber risk, and the bank’s BISO organization. Earlier stops included leading the Technology Remediation Program directly under the bank’s CTO, where he directed delivery of more than 20 regulatory enforcement actions across the security and technology landscape, and running Secure Infrastructure Engineering with more than 550 personnel responsible for network border security, endpoint security, and email security. He started in Wells Fargo’s Unix DMZ security engineering team in 2001 and moved through network architecture, corporate service delivery, and enterprise network operations before reaching the executive ranks.
Robert Williams – CISO and Corporate VP, Microchip Technology
Robert Williams has led the security and systems integration of 22 companies that Microchip Technology acquired over three decades, absorbing purchases ranging from a few million dollars up to $10 billion into the company’s centralized business systems and data centers in Chandler. He has held the CISO and Corporate Vice President title for five years, following eight years as CIO, inside a Microchip career that started in finance and infrastructure roles back in 1994. Williams builds smart-sourced teams across multiple countries to handle that integration work directly rather than outsourcing it. He started his career as a first-year auditor at KPMG Peat Marwick in 1989, working with semiconductor, local government, and real estate clients before joining Microchip five years later.
Martin Mazor – (Former) CISO, onsemi
Martin Mazor spent three years and three months as CISO at onsemi in the Greater Phoenix Area, a role that ended in July 2026 after he led the chipmaker’s global information security program. That tenure capped more than two decades of CISO and senior security leadership roles in five industries. Before onsemi, Mazor led security at Aera Technology for a year, then spent nearly six years as SVP and CISO at Entertainment Partners in Southern California, where he oversaw information security, physical security, IT infrastructure, DevOps, and public cloud operations together. He held the VP and CISO title at Meggitt PLC, an aerospace components manufacturer, for just over three years before that, and ran global CISO duties at Ingram Micro for nine years, managing a multi-million dollar annual security budget alongside the company’s business continuity and disaster recovery program. His career traces back further still, to global head of information security at Fluor Corporation in 2000 and a co-founding role at Island Technologies in the mid-1990s, a résumé that runs through engineering and construction, technology distribution, aerospace, entertainment, and semiconductors.
James Baird – VP & CISO, GoTo Foods
James Baird has been the first security leader at three separate organizations: building a program from nothing at ANDMORE after a three-company merger, serving as the American Cancer Society’s first CISO, HIPAA Security Officer, and Data Protection Officer, and taking on Prommis Solutions’ first information and physical security leadership role. At GoTo Foods in the Greater Phoenix Area, where he has served as VP and CISO since June 2021, he leads a 44-person team across the US, India, and Costa Rica covering cybersecurity, privacy, product security, infrastructure, and retail-card fraud for a $7 billion system covering more than 5,500 domestic and 300 international locations. His team cut incident response labor hours 56% year over year, reduced cyber-insurance premiums 20% annually for three consecutive years, and generated $350,000 in annual cost avoidance through automation and records-management improvements. At the American Cancer Society, Baird eliminated 373 audit findings within his first 12 months, including 24 critical regulatory findings, a result that let the nonprofit’s board close its dedicated remediation oversight subcommittee. He also spent time at Global Payments in the months after the company’s 2012 breach, holding PCI DSS recertification accountability while the company worked to restore merchant and card-brand confidence.
The Long Way to the Title
None of these six arrived at a CISO title quickly. Williams spent three decades inside Microchip before the security title landed on his desk five years ago. McMaster put in 24 years at Wells Fargo before Western Alliance gave him the CISO role outright. Young spent fifteen years building Honeywell’s internal risk and audit functions before he ever held the title anywhere else. Mazor is the outlier, carrying the CISO title from company to company across five industries for two decades rather than growing it internally at one. Baird has now built the function from scratch three separate times at three separate employers. Phoenix’s roster currently runs on both models: security leaders who grew the title inside one company for years, and security leaders who rebuild it fresh every few years somewhere new.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
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- San Diego’s CISOs to Watch: A City That Keeps Its Security Leaders
- Philadelphia’s CISOs to Watch: Securing Health Systems and Heavy Industry
- CISOs to Watch in the Twin Cities: From State Government to the Supply Chain
- CISOs to Watch in Charlotte: From Theme Parks to Financial Services
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.