Data and AI company Databricks has expanded its team with the addition of former Citrix and Google security executive, Fermín Serna, as its new chief security officer (CSO).
Serna brings more than 20 years of enterprise information security expertise to the Databricks leadership team and will oversee the expansion of their cybersecurity organisation.
He will also lead their high-impact network, platform and user security programmes as the company expands its platform capabilities for the next phase of growth, Databricks said.
"For Databricks and our customers across the globe, security is paramount and I am thrilled to welcome Fermín to the team as our chief security officer," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks.
"Fermín's deep technical knowledge and impressive experience building and leading best-in-class security teams will prove invaluable for Databricks' next chapter," added Ghodsi.
Serna joins Databricks' from Citrix, where he most recently led a robust global security and data privacy practice as the CSO.
Before that, Serna served as the head of product security at Google. There, he led Google’s product security team and worked closely with external technology partners to build highly secure APIs, development libraries and containment frameworks to ensure Google security standards were met at every turn of the product life cycle.
Serna’s career also includes previous stints at Microsoft and Semmle, a code-analysis platform provider that was acquired by Github back in 2019.
"Databricks is at the forefront of data and AI innovation as it pioneers the new lakehouse category and I am incredibly excited to join the leadership team during such a pivotal time," said Serna.
"I look forward to working with customers, partners and the world class Databricks security team as we bring the company and product vision to new heights," he added.
