Why I Joined Endor Labs to Build our India Team
Sriram Subramanian recently left his position as VP of Engineering at Citrix to lead the India R&D center at Endor Labs. We asked him what made him take the leap and what's his vision for the India team.
Sriram Subramanian recently left his position as VP of Engineering at Citrix to lead the India R&D center at Endor Labs. We asked him what made him take the leap and what's his vision for the India team.
Sriram Subramanian recently left his position as VP of Engineering at Citrix to lead the India R&D center at Endor Labs. We asked him what made him take the leap and what's his vision for the India team.
Sriram Subramanian recently left his position as VP of Engineering at Citrix to lead the India R&D center at Endor Labs. We asked him what made him take the leap and what's his vision for the India team.
Sriram Subramanian recently left his position as VP of Engineering at Citrix to lead the India R&D center at Endor Labs. We asked him what made him take the leap and what's his vision for the India team.
A few weeks ago, I left my previous role as VP Engineering at Citrix. I had a few days off before joining Endor Labs as the Managing Director and Head for India R&D team. During this time, I was asked about the reasons for my joining Endor Labs, an early stage startup in the software supply chain security space.
The reasons for changing a job are very personal and unique. So I will not talk about aspects like position, salary, and benefits etc. I was fortunate enough to have multiple opportunities to choose from and these aspects tend to be minor factors when faced with choices. The pros and cons of joining a startup or even a large company are also well documented. So I will focus on four themes that actually helped me make the decision to join Endor Labs.
- The security landscape is shifting left - From working in network security earlier in my career, I have been steadily shifting left within the cybersecurity domain. This has aligned well with the trends in the industry, where new threat vectors and attacks have forced the software industry to take security more seriously in early stages of software development. Software supply chain security is bringing the software development and security teams much closer and this proximity has created the need for a new breed of tools and products. In short there is a pressing problem that needs to be solved.
- Developer productivity - Another Shift left trend is geared towards developers. Today developers are expected to write better documentation, better code, better tests and also monitor production. These expectations have sound basis but without good tools, you will over burden your developers. As security shifts left towards developers, organizations will do well to augment their software development tools to help the developers focus on building secure applications without disrupting their flow.
- Current solutions - The existing solutions are not only fragmented but are also late in the development lifecycle. Most companies offer training programs to their developers without a measurable impact in shifting security to the left. Endor is rethinking this aspect and working on ideas that actually help developers write more secure code. This also aligns with my passion to make the life of our developers easier so that they can solve business problems.
- The India connection - India has one of the largest software developer communities. Most tech companies have a large presence in India and their developers are doing some cutting edge work. India is also home to sizable security research and cyber security professionals. This adds a new dimension to my role at Endor labs. My team and I have the opportunity to engage closely with top engineers from every tech company on the planet, right in our backyard. Helping our peers by interacting and learning from them is the best way to create an ecosystem and build developer centric products.
- A stellar founding team - last but not the least, the awesome founding team at Endor also helped me in the decision making process. The CEO of Endor Labs, Varun Badhwar and CTO, Dimitri Stiliadis are serial entrepreneurs. The founding engineers are industry experts in their areas and have a very strong technical background and the investors are who’s who of the security industry.
My vision for the team
The first few days at Endor Labs have validated these reasons and I am super motivated and excited to contribute to the success of this company. If you look at the job opportunities at Endor, you will notice that all areas of product development are covered in India. As developers we understand the importance of secure software development and also the lack of modern tools to help our productivity. There is a lot of excitement around this area in the open source community as well. This is a great opportunity to build a security product - for developers by developers without compromising on security and productivity.