Kevin Mandia joins the Amazon board with 30-plus years in cybersecurity

Amazon elected Kevin Mandia to its Board of Directors on September 8. Mandia founded Mandiant and served as its CEO before Google acquired the firm in September 2022, and he has worked against cyber threats in the public and private sectors for more than 30 years.

Amazon called cybersecurity “one of the most consequential risks and responsibilities organizations face today,” and pointed to advances in AI as the reason the threat landscape keeps moving. That is the company’s stated reason for putting the expertise at board level, where directors decide which questions management has to answer.

Mandia comes to the seat with two current jobs. He is founder and CEO of Armadin, a security company that works on large and complex environments, and co-founder and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, a venture firm where he funds and mentors security founders.

His government record runs alongside the commercial one. He served on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and on CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the panel that advises the federal agency responsible for defending civilian government networks. Earlier, in the U.S. Air Force, he worked as a computer security officer at the Pentagon and then as a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Ballistic Ventures keeps Mandia close to the companies being built now, and Armadin keeps him running one. Amazon gets a director who is still doing the work rather than remembering it.