About DanDan is CISO and VP of Cybersecurity for Shipt, a Target subsidiary. He worked previously as a Distinguished Engineer on Target’s cloud infrastructure. He served as CTO for Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential campaign. Prior to that Dan worked with the Hillary for America tech team through the Groundwork, and contributed as a founding developer on Spinnaker while at Netflix. Dan is an O’Reilly published author and avid public speaker.  Links:
Shipt: https://www.shipt.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/danveloper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danveloper

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn’t going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport’s unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. Sometimes I talk to people who are involved in working on the nonprofit slash political side of the world. Other times I talk to folks who are deep in the throes of commercial businesses, and I obviously personally spend more of my time on one of those sides of the world than I do the other. But today’s guest is a little bit different, Dan Woods is the CISO and VP of Cybersecurity at Shipt, a division of Target where he’s worked for a fair number of years, but took some time off for his side project, the side hustle as the kids call it, as the CTO for the Biden campaign. Dan, thank you for joining me.Dan: Yeah. Thank you, Corey. Happy to be here.Corey: So, you have an interesting track record as far as your career goes, you’ve been at Target for a long time. You were a distinguished engineer—not to be confused with ‘extinguished engineer,’ which is just someone who is finally—the fire has gone out. And from there you went from being a distinguished engineer to a VP slash CISO, which generally looks a lot less engineer-like, and a lot more, at least in my experience, of sitting in a whole lot of executive-level meetings, managing teams, et cetera. Was that, in fact, an individual contributor—or IC—move into a management track, or am I just misunderstanding this because these are commonly overloaded terms in our industry?Dan: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s exactly right. So, IC to leadership, two distinct tracks, distinct career paths. It was something that I’ve spent a number of years thinking about and more or less working toward and making sure that it was the right path for me to go. The interesting thing about the break that I took in the middle of Target when I was CTO for the campaign is that that was a leadership role, right. I led the team.