Adrian Ludwig

Adrian Ludwig is the Chief Security Officer of Rippling, appointed in March 2026.

Career path

As a teenager, Ludwig was recruited by the U.S. Department of Defense to find vulnerabilities in cryptographic and networked systems.

He later built security capabilities at Macromedia and Adobe, and also worked at Nest.

At Google he served as Director of Android Security, protecting users of the Android platform.

Ludwig joined Atlassian in May 2018 as Chief Information Security Officer, a role he held for three years, before moving into the role of Chief Trust Officer there.

In 2024, he joined Tools for Humanity, the technology company developing tools for the Worldcoin crypto project, as Chief Information Security Officer, overseeing data security internally and externally.

He went on to become Chief Architect and CISO at Tools for Humanity, leading development of a privacy-preserving, global proof-of-human identity infrastructure.

In March 2026, Ludwig was appointed Chief Security Officer at Rippling, a business software company that brings together payroll, expenses, benefits and IT systems onto a single platform.

He is also an active cybersecurity advisor and angel investor.

Remit at Rippling

At Rippling, Ludwig leads the company's global security strategy across product security, infrastructure protection, trust, and risk.

His mandate is to ensure that as customers consolidate more of their workforce and business operations on the platform, security functions as an embedded architectural advantage rather than an afterthought.

He said: "My focus is to make world-class security an invisible, reliable constant for every customer, so they can move faster with complete confidence."

Public talks

In October 2020, while serving as CISO at Atlassian, Ludwig took part in a fireside chat with Bugcrowd CEO Ashish Gupta on his path from hacker to CISO, discussing how his view of the attack surface changed and how crowdsourced security supported that journey.