Pankaj has held technology leadership roles across a wide variety of leading companies, ranging from startups to some of the industry’s largest firms. Pankaj is the Chief Executive Officer at Security First Corp. since October 2019. In the last six months, he created the very first Cloud Security service (SaaS) based on Single-Pass Data Security architecture. He joined Security First Corp as a Chief Product and Strategy Officer (CPSO) in August 2018. He is responsible for the long-range vision to set the direction for the company’s products, as well as running the development, testing, and delivery organizations for Security First’s products.
Prior to joining Security First, Pankaj was Vice President of Engineering at Zscaler, bringing next-generation security to the cloud and building it to scale across hundreds of data centers. He also led the team to build its first AI/ML-based big data platform. Prior to that, he was GM and Director of Engineering at Microsoft, including leading the Windows Security Team, as well as delivering several networking and security products, and responsible for the revenue of over $800M. He founded iPolicy Networks and led product and engineering teams to build the industry’s first implementation of a next-generation firewall solution for enterprise and service providers delivering the very first implementation of secure access from the service edge (SASE). Pankaj is accustomed to thinking years ahead of the market and has been strategic advisors at several security startups.
Pankaj has completed a Ph.D. work at Arizona State University after obtaining an MS in Computer Engineering also at Arizona State. Also, he has completed advanced courses at Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley. He is based in Silicon Valley in California.