Chief Security Officer and Head of Engineering for Trust and Safety at Airbnb. She leads teams responsible for developing the technology (Platforms, tools and AI models), to safeguard the Airbnb community, as well as for securing Airbnb’s infrastructure and information assets. She is also the executive co-sponsor of Airbnb Tech’s Diversity Council.

Here’s Vijaya’s story of how she got to Airbnb, in her own words.

Straight shot to science and engineering

I grew up in a modest, multi-generational family in India with 30 to 40 family members under one roof on any given day. As the oldest child in that house, I was expected to excel academically and set an example for the other children to follow.

In our culture back then, being “good at school” was synonymous with shining in science and math. As luck would have it, I had a strong affinity for those subjects and enjoyed studying and diving deep into them. I followed a natural path that combined math and science, studying engineering in college, and got a bachelor’s and two master’s in electrical engineering. This foundation paved the way for my future work in technology.

Stumbling into cybersecurity

After college, I landed my first job as a Software Engineer at Cisco. However, my entry into the security field was accidental. I simply followed a manager I liked who was moving into a new security business unit, fell in love with Security and never looked back after that! There was no grand plan or calculated career strategy.

After 17 years at Cisco leading product development for a $1B security product portfolio, I headed to FireEye, another well-known name in the Cybersecurity space. There I had the responsibility for helping the company transition from on-prem to a cloud/SaaS business model, and growing the revenue of their cloud security portfolio. That role gave me the experience of working on different areas of security, as well as leading both Product Management and Engineering in a General Manager capacity.

Next, I led Product Development at Lookout, a startup in San Francisco focused on mobile security. At the time, it was a consumer security company pivoting to building for enterprise customers. I didn’t know it then, but that glimpse of consumer security was a great primer for my eventual role at Airbnb.

Cybersecurity is an ever-changing domain with constant innovation and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working and learning in such a dynamic space. Each major technological transformation — from cloud to mobile to AI — brings novel security challenges to solve for businesses and end users.