Meet Sqreen’s new Director of Engineering, Beth

Recently, Beth LeBeau joined Sqreen as our Director of Engineering. We’re thrilled to have her on board, so I took a little time to sit down with her and learn more about her career, what’s she’s excited to build, and why she joined Sqreen.

So Beth, can you tell us a little about your background?

I spent the first part of my life in the Boston area. I grew up there, went to MIT, and worked in the area for my first couple jobs after graduating. From there, I moved to Florida to co-found a company focusing on home theater audio technology. My co-founder was an aerospace engineer, and had the idea to use the algorithms that are used to guide rockets to make normal living rooms sound more like dedicated home theaters. My role was to put together both the software and hardware needed to make it happen. It was a challenging problem, and a lot of fun, but we never found a good market fit for what we were trying to build, and eventually the company failed. I decided to relocate to Seattle where I shifted gears, going from small companies to much larger ones in Amazon and Google, as well as making the transition from being a software engineer to managing them.

What were some of your favorite projects over the past few years?

My favorite projects have to do with diving into systems and the ways that they’re architected. For example, at Amazon one of the teams that I managed handled processing payments for all transactions done on Amazon. While I was there, they were really working to expand into new markets and new countries, which meant we had to support new payment methods and processors. When you’re dealing with payments, security and safety are of the utmost importance, so it was difficult and slow to make changes to much of the payment-related code. One of the projects we focused on there was to figure out how to speed up our processes while properly addressing all of our safety and security needs. We tried to rethink the way that the systems were architected to enable us to make changes quickly while enhancing the safety of the customer’s data. It ended up being a lot of fun to see happen.

After Amazon, I joined Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team as an engineering manager. I honestly didn’t expect to like SRE, but it was amazing to learn how to build reliable systems that process massive amounts of data. I had expected SRE to be all about operations, but it wasn’t — I mean, it is an important part of the role, but so much of good SRE is about understanding how to build a reliable whole out of unreliable components — and proactively working to make that happen.

I also really loved the technical nature of my job. Before my management role expanded, I got to help build automation components that dozens of teams at Google make use of, as well as contributing to technical infrastructure that copied petabytes of data all across the world.

Can you tell me how you first became interested in security?

Yeah, although the teams that I managed at Amazon were highly focused on the security of payments, I started off as a Software Engineer on a more consumer-focused product that most people don’t remember called “PayPhrase”. A couple months after I joined, Rasmus Lerdorf tweeted about a Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability that he had found on Amazon. It turns out it was due to a change that my team had made. So, on my very first day on-call at Amazon, I got paged for that! It was a little intimidating tracking down the problem, fixing it, and then staying in the office close to midnight to get the change pushed to the main amazon.com website. As scary as it was, it was pretty impressive to see how fast a company the size of Amazon could be when reacting to an issue.

I didn’t want to see that happen again, so I decided that I would learn about security — and help the team. As I started looking into it, it quickly became obvious that the more I learned, the more I saw how big and hard the problem was. I decided that it would be useful to know how to communicate with Security Engineers — but there was a reason why there were people who specialized in that field, and it wasn’t going to be something that I could easily teach myself while doing my job. So I needed to reign in my ambitions a bit on that front.

So you moved from Seattle to Paris for Sqreen. Can you tell me about that decision, and how you’re settling in?

To be honest, it was a little bit scary at first. I had moved a couple times in the past for work, but taking my family to another country where I don’t speak the language fluently was a bit intimidating. But I head into work every day amazed that I live in Paris, it has everything you’d imagine: food, culture, architecture. There are some bumps as I’m learning my way around, but the team has been super helpful right from the start. Plus, with Sqreen being an English-speaking office, it’s been easy to settle in to that part of my life here. I’m married to a wine writer, so France is wonderful for her career, and even my normally temperamental cat is happier than I’ve ever seen her! What’s been really surprising to me is the startup and tech culture I’ve found here. Being from the US, it’s not something I’ve really heard about in the past, but with all the co-working spaces, and meetups, it feels more lively than Seattle.

What makes a talented engineering leader such as yourself leave a great role at Google to join a startup? And why Sqreen?

I reached a point in my management career where I really was looking to grow in a new direction. I started to give some thought to trying a different team at Google, but given where I was in the tech stack at Google, I was really pretty isolated from our customers, and I missed that sense of connection. So I decided to look outside of the company as well.

When the opportunity at Sqreen came along it really felt like a nearly perfect fit for what I was looking for. It’s an amazing product that changes the entire security space — and it’s focused on making something that’s really hard — easy. When I saw the demos, I knew that even if I didn’t end up working at Sqreen, I’d almost certainly be a customer down the road.

Joining a startup gave me the opportunity to take what I’ve learned over my career and apply it in a high impact way. I’ve spent the last 10 years seeing how successful companies build and ship high quality products and reliable software. Coming to a place like Sqreen lets me adapt what I’ve learned to a new environment. I think it’s difficult to build a successful organization at scale unless you already know what success looks like. I’ve seen success at large companies, and I’m going to work to find out what it will take to get us there at Sqreen.

You’ve joined Sqreen as our Director of Engineering — can you tell us a bit more about your role? What do you do day-to-day and how does this role differ from what a CTO does?

I think the partnership between the CTO and Engineering Director is really important for the success of any company. Core to the CTO’s role is to set the technical direction of the company — shape the architecture and set the goals that we should be moving towards. Central to my role is to make that possible, by ensuring that he has the right structure, processes, and people in place to deliver results while balancing the needs of the product, the technology, and the business. The CTO is also the external face of the company, and nearly all of my focus will be inwards.

My role is still very technical — it’s not only focused on execution. I use my background in SRE to help identify risks to the availability and reliability of our systems, and I need to be able to understand the technical realities of the software to help figure out what it means to the business. It’s a balance between technology, people, and business.

What are you most excited to work on in the next few months?

When I joined Sqreen, I was focused on the potential of the product to engineers like me — those who knew that security was important, but also knew how hard it was to do properly. Since joining Sqreen, I’ve started to see the value that the product has to companies that already have small security teams of their own — enabling them to both do their own jobs more effectively, but also work more closely with developers. There’s a lot of work that we’re doing on this front, and it’s exciting to see how it will impact our current and future customers, as well as the technical challenges that we’re going to face as our system continues to grow to support new cases.

As we scale, you’re going to be hiring for your team — what do you look for in engineers?

Absolutely, there’s a lot that we want to accomplish. I’m looking to build out a team of engineers, with a diverse set of perspectives, who are excited about the idea of helping shape the future of software security tooling. More than anything else, we’re looking for engineers who are excited about building a product that solves real problems that our customers face. Sqreen engineers not only build the software; they care about and help define what they build.

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today, Beth! If any of our readers are looking to get in touch, where can they find you?

It was great talking to you! People can reach out to me through LinkedIn, Twitter or if they’re in Paris, I’m usually at the Sqreenhouse for our monthly Sqreenpero.