Shifting Left: Why I’m Building at Chainguard

When people ask me, “Why Chainguard, why now?” my answer is simple: I feel like I have unfinished business at the intersection of security and infrastructure, and Chainguard is the perfect place to pursue it.

We’re eliminating engineering toil to provide a trusted foundation—free of malware and known vulnerabilities—so developers can focus on what they do best: building and solving problems for their customers.

At a fast-growing company, you need to feel deeply connected to the mission. There will be ups and downs, and the only way to sustain shipping velocity (the only true moat in technology) is if you’re genuinely excited about the work. That’s exactly how I feel about joining Chainguard.

A Shift Left in My Career

My journey into security started back in college when I managed the campus’ Network Operations Center (NOC). One day we got a visit from a government agency who let us know we’d unknowingly purchased counterfeit network cards being used to compromise American companies and universities. That experience opened my eyes to how something “upstream” could compromise a system even when you thought you were doing everything right.

Later, I worked on building large-scale networks and systems, and performing penetration tests for regulated companies. It was eye-opening how often systems could be compromised by months- or years-old exploits. That experience has stayed with me.

I then spent almost a decade at Cloudflare, building products that block network and application attacks at the edge. But no matter how advanced our tools became, if an application was insecure at its core, attackers would always find a way around us. That was frustrating.

Now by joining Chainguard, my own career is shifting left: from defending at the network edge to protecting at the source. Our mission is to stop attacks before they ever become a headline risk for CISOs and CEOs.

How I’m Diving In

The first thing I did after joining was set up a home lab: Kubernetes, Helm, JFrog Artifactory, Traefik, chainctl—you name it. I wanted to see what it feels like to be a Chainguard customer. Along the way, I jotted down dozens of questions for our product and engineering teams. 

I strongly believe in dogfooding: the more we use our own products, the more we remove friction and improve the developer experience. Developers don’t want security forced on them; they want tools that actually make their work easier. That’s exactly the kind of product we’ll keep building at Chainguard.

I’ve also been listening to and joining customer calls: These customer conversations are crucial, and acting on them is a big part of how we earn trust. It’s my team’s and my job to create a product roadmap that our customers are excited about while refining our approach to building new products.

Let’s Build Together

I couldn’t be more excited about where we’re headed. My goal is to partner closely with our customers, understand their toughest challenges, and make Chainguard the best developer experience in security, period.

If you’re a customer (or want to be one), I’d love to hear from you. And if you’re excited about our mission and want to help, reach out or check out our openings here. Let’s build the future together.