Security Program & $4.4B IPO
Building an enterprise security program from scratch and leading the infrastructure that carried a multinational vacation rental company to the public markets.
The Problem
The company managed over 35,000 vacation rental properties across multiple countries, processing hundreds of millions in transactions annually. It was scaling fast and preparing for a public offering — but had no formal security program, no dedicated security team, and infrastructure practices that hadn't kept pace with growth.
The engineering organization needed someone who could simultaneously build a security program from first principles, modernize infrastructure for zero-downtime operations, and establish the data platform capabilities required to support machine learning systems driving over $1.3 billion in gross revenue.
My Role
I joined as a Team Lead managing data scientists, data engineers, and cross-functional software engineers. Over four years I was promoted twice — first to Director of Engineering, then to VP of Information Security — as the scope of my work expanded from a single team to leading central infrastructure, data platform, reliability, and security across the organization.
What I Built
- Designed and implemented a comprehensive, enterprise-grade security program from scratch — including team building, tool acquisition, vendor evaluation, and policy integration across the company.
- Established architecture for fully containerized infrastructure and highly-available data systems, enabling zero-downtime maintenance across production environments.
- Led the design and scaling of machine learning systems — yield management, real estate growth models, advertising optimization, and field operations tooling — that collectively accounted for over $1.3B in gross revenue.
- Managed 100+ AWS accounts as units of isolation, building DevOps practices that maintained security and uniform observability at scale.
- Architected blue-green deployment pipelines that eliminated downtime during maintenance windows across the entire platform.
Impact
Zero critical security incidents from program inception through IPO. The security, infrastructure, and data platform work provided the operational foundation that enabled a successful $4.4 billion public offering in December 2021. The containerization and observability practices I established became the standard operating model for the engineering organization.