As chief security officer, Serna will lead network, platform and user security programmes at Databricks, along with governance and compliance efforts as the company expands its platform capabilities and positions itself for the next phase of growth.

Serna brings over 20 years of enterprise information security expertise to the Databricks leadership team, and will oversee the expansion of the organisation’s mission-critical cyber security organisation.

As senior vice-president and CISO of Citrix, Serna led the company’s global security and data privacy practice, serving for almost two years.

He also served as the head of product security at Google, leading the team responsible for Google Product Security and working closely with external technology partners to build highly secure APIs, development libraries and containment frameworks.

During his seven-year tenure at Google, Serna worked to establish and implement security review practices, and also oversaw the vulnerability response and risk mitigation protocols for several product groups.

In addition, his career consists of senior security roles at Microsoft, as well as the position of CSO at Semmle (acquired by GitHub), establishing and leading the security research and vulnerability response teams.

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“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 new Databricks chief security officer 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.”

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, commented: “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.

“Fermín’s deep technical knowledge and impressive experience building and leading best-in-class security teams will prove invaluable for Databricks’ next chapter.”