About Mike Gualtieri
Mike is a seasoned technical engineering leader with over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, software engineering, and cloud-native infrastructure. He currently leads Security Engineering at Netlify, having previously built and led the Security & Compliance program at the high-growth startup Gatsby, guiding it through its acquisition by Netlify, and is a member of the IANS Faculty.
Some of Mike’s earliest memories were playing with small programs his father wrote for a hand-built 8086 computer. By the age of 7 he was writing simple BASIC programs that would show off the low-res graphical computing power of his family’s Franklin computer. Mike’s enthusiasm for security was also apparent at this young age, as he decided to write a program to (weakly) password protect some of his 5.25” floppy disks, only to discover that 20 years later he had to hack into his own files to discover that the secret password was ‘ninja’.
An avid security researcher, Mike has earned multiple CVEs and continues to write about security and present at top security conferences. He also developed cybersecurity curriculum for the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing & Information, training students in software vulnerability exploitation, the OWASP Top 10, penetration testing, and red team TTPs using the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Earlier in his career, Mike founded three tech companies. As president of Eris Interactive Group, he spent over a decade designing, launching, and maintaining dozens of software products across a wide range of industries. In 2019, he and a business partner spun out the firm’s security arm into SAVIO Information Security, where Mike led technical programs assisting businesses with security program development, regulatory compliance (PCI DSS, NIST 800-171, CMMC), incident response planning, penetration testing, and red/purple teaming. Before his consulting work, Mike was the innovator behind Kiddix, a Linux-based operating system for kids with integrated parental controls, where he served as founder & CEO, leading the team and architecting multiple products.
Mike holds an MBA from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and graduated cum laude with a BS in Computer Science from Seton Hall University.
Specialties: Cybersecurity Leadership · Engineering Leadership · Detection & Response · Offensive Security (Red Teaming, Purple Teaming, Penetration Testing, Application Security) · Adversarial Emulation · Threat Intelligence · Security Architecture · Security Engineering · Security Research · Cloud-Native Security · Cloud Engineering · Software Product Management · Software Architecture · Software Engineering