I’ve been a Cribl customer for years, but in truth, I’ve been a fan for even longer. I’ve now joined the herd as the Sr. Director of Security Engineering and Operations at a moment when the company is at an inflection point. We recently surpassed $300M ARR, 1,000 employees, and are pushing the envelope daily, so this move feels less like a new role and more like a natural evolution.
My mission here at Cribl is to partner with our CISO, Myke Lyons, and the broader team to scale our world-class security foundation to keep pace with one of the most explosive growth trajectories in enterprise software. We are ensuring that as Cribl grows, our detection response, and engineering capabilities continue to set the standard.
As a practitioner who spent years managing security for a massive, complex enterprise, Cribl wasn’t just another tool in the stack. It was the linchpin of my entire strategy. I’ve spent my career in the trenches of SecOps, and I’ve learned one universal truth: you cannot secure what you cannot see, and you certainly cannot see everything when your budget is being devoured by the tax of data ingest.
The "Aha!" moment
In a large-scale enterprise, the sheer volume of telemetry is staggering. We dealt with hundreds of thousands of log sources, most of which were filled with exhaust—unusable metadata that serves no purpose for detection but costs a fortune to index in a traditional SIEM.
The turning point for me was realized in year one. By using Cribl to pick and choose the specific fields we needed (effectively siphoning the signal from the noise) we realized significant, multi-million dollar savings. When you can tell a CISO that you’re increasing visibility while simultaneously slashing costs by seven figures, it’s a career-defining no-brainer.
AI ambition meets infrastructure reality
We find ourselves in a unique moment in the industry. Every organization has massive AI ambition, yet most are hitting the wall of infrastructure reality. The AI era promises exponential insights, but the reality is exponential data growth, and our legacy tools are breaking under the weight.
The security industry is currently playing a frantic game of catch-up. AI is moving at a velocity that leaves traditional security postures in the dust. My passion lies in bridging that gap. Specifically, I’m focused on agentic AI and the way organizations manage, route, and act on massive telemetry volumes using autonomous agents. Most companies today lack the visibility to even know which AI tools are being utilized within their environment, let alone the ability to secure them. Cribl is the only player in the market positioned to give practitioners their control back. And with our recent FedRAMP authorization, Cribl is proving we can also solve these challenges for even the most regulated organizations.
The mission: Engineering the foundation
High-growth environments create unique security challenges, but they also create the opportunity to build strong foundations from the start. That’s exactly the kind of challenge I enjoy.
We aren't just keeping the lights on. Instead, we are scaling a world-class operation across Security Engineering, Threat Hunting, Threat Intelligence, Incident Response, and Insider Risk. And of course, we are eating our own dog food, or goat food as I’m loving all the goat references here. I’m working directly with our product teams to use the Cribl suite to secure Cribl itself. We’re moving toward a future of data lakes and agentic AI detections that will serve as a blueprint for the rest of the industry.
A culture of genius
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the people. In just my first few days, the sheer genius of this team has been astounding. It’s a rare thing to find a company that balances cutting-edge technical brilliance with a remote-first culture that actually respects the human beings behind the keyboards. Cribl has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Best Startup Employers and a fixture on the Cloud 100 list for good reason.
To my fellow practitioners still struggling with legacy constraints: I’ve been where you are. I know the pain of choosing between visibility and budget. I joined Cribl because I’m tired of that compromise.
I’ll be at RSAC in San Francisco soon to talk all things SecOps, agentic AI, and where Cribl fits into this new reality. If you want to meet with someone who’s sat in your chair, let’s link up.
