Lacework Inc., a security and compliance platform for cloud generation, today announced an expansion of its leadership team that includes key executive hires, including the surprise appointment of David “Hat” Hatfield as chief executive.

Other hires in addition to Hatfield (pictured) include former Chief Executive Dan Hubbard, who will become Lacework’s chief product officer; security and machine learning researcher Ulfar Erlingsson, who joined as chief architect; and industry veteran Mike Staiger as chief financial officer.

Finally, Lacework founder and Chief Technology Officer Vikram Kapoor is taking on an additional role as the founder of a wholly owned Lacework entity, with details coming at a later date.

The shakeup might come as a bit of a surprise given that Hubbard had been appointed CEO less than two years ago. Indeed, in an interview last month with SiliconANGLE, he gave no indication of a planned change, though the occasion was a massive $525 million funding round, and such rounds can often carry strings such as changes in leadership.

Hatfield is a well-known industry executive with 30 years of leadership experience in public and venture-backed private technology companies. For the past eight years, Hatfield was the president and more recently the vice-chairman of Pure Storage Inc., a data storage solution platform for mission-critical enterprise systems.

Prior to that, he held key leadership roles at Akamai Technologies Inc. and Limelight Networks Inc. from their early stages until their initial public offerings.

“With tens of thousands of companies and hundreds of billions of dollars shifting away from data centers to the cloud, the attack surface area and software development processes have fundamentally changed, and the legacy approaches for security simply don’t work,” said Hatfield. “Lacework was purpose-built to secure digital businesses built on dynamic cloud infrastructure.”

By appointing Erlingsson as chief architect, Lacework said, it will be bringing together an even stronger team than ever.

He has more than 25 years of experience leading technology efforts in computer security, privacy and machine learning, with more than 30 issued U.S. patents. He has authored dozens of influential publications with wide-ranging impact on computer architecture, operating systems, data-parallel processing, as well as computer security and privacy mechanisms.

Erlingsson is currently chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Privacy and Security and joins Lacework from Apple Inc., where he originally led a machine learning development lab for privacy-preserving technology.

Prior to that he held similar positions at Google Brain, a deep learning artificial intelligence research team at Google LLC that combines machine learning with information systems and large-scale computing resources. He also led research in cloud security with Google’s infrastructure security team as well as at Microsoft Research.

“Digital businesses should not have to choose between innovation speed and security,” said Hatfield. “With our leading innovation and customer obsession, Lacework is poised to become the leading security platform of the cloud era.”

These hires and additions to its leadership team come on the heels of a $525 million investment funding round that closed on Jan. 7.

Photo: Lacework