Geoff Belknap

Geoff Belknap has joined HubSpot as Chief Trust Officer, as SecurityWeek recorded in its industry-moves roundup for the Week of September 14, 2026. He came from Microsoft, where he had been Corporate Vice President and Operating CISO, and earlier in his career he served as CISO at LinkedIn, Slack and Palantir.

Career path

A December 2025 SecurityWeek article on Microsoft's security leadership describes Belknap's promotion into that Microsoft role in more detail: as Operating CISO for Core and Enterprise, reporting to Global CISO Igor Tsyganskiy, he became responsible for Microsoft's core infrastructure, corporate applications, and security for mergers and acquisitions, having been promoted from Corporate Vice President and Deputy CISO.

An earlier SecurityWeek interview, published in 2024 while Belknap was still CISO at LinkedIn, traces his path into security back to a job as a communications engineer building high-speed backbone networks, and says he later moved from telecoms into a startup network-security firm before joining Palantir to build its security team from scratch. He recalled that assignment as a difficult but rewarding one, describing it as building a security team and program from nothing. The article says he then became Palantir's CISO before later becoming Slack's Chief Security Officer and then CISO at LinkedIn.

How he describes the CISO's role

In the 2024 interview, Belknap said he holds a business degree rather than an engineering degree, and argued that combination suits the job: "I think that’s a good combination for a CISO: practical experience in engineering with a business education." He also said a security program's success rests less on the CISO personally than on the culture and team built underneath that person.

None of the three sources describes HubSpot's Chief Trust Officer remit in the same operational detail as his past CISO posts, so this profile does not speculate on what that scope covers.