Career profile
Alexis Wales
Chief Information Security Officer, GitHub
- Current role, per sources checked 20 May 2026
- September 2024
Alexis Wales is the Chief Information Security Officer of GitHub, appointed to the role in September 2024.
Career path
Wales spent more than twelve years at the Department of Homeland Security, including service at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, before joining GitHub.
At CISA she held the title of Deputy Associate Director for Threat Hunting within the agency's Cybersecurity Division, leading analysts who performed operational and strategic-level work to support network defense and resilience across the DHS stakeholder community.
In that period she also served as CISA's Election Security Mission Manager, coordinating the agency's resources against the Protect2020 Lines of Effort and aligning election security work to changing threat and risk environments.
Her broader background spans twenty years defending critical national and private sector networks, with positions at the Department of Defense and DHS's CISA.
Wales joined GitHub in January 2022 and held cybersecurity leadership roles at the company before being named CISO, an appointment she announced on her LinkedIn page.
Current remit
As CISO, Wales leads a team of security experts focused on safeguarding the GitHub platform, its products, and the open source community, supporting more than 150 million developers who build and deploy software on GitHub.
She has described this background as the source of her interest in collaboration between the public and private sectors to address security challenges affecting widely used technology.
Wales describes herself as a "borderless" leader, reflecting a view that the most significant security impact comes from open dialogue and collaboration across sectors to reach risk-informed, secure outcomes.
Public speaking and published work
In 2020, while serving as CISA's Deputy Associate Director for Threat Hunting, Wales spoke at the Security Transformation Summit. As GitHub's CISO she has continued to write for the GitHub Blog, including a piece titled Securing the git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution vulnerability, describing how her team validated and fixed a vulnerability within two hours.
