Career profile
Lea Kissner
Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President, LinkedIn
- Role as of 20 October 2026, the date of the latest source
- August 2024
As of October 2026, Lea Kissner is the Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President of LinkedIn, having been appointed in August 2024. In the role, Kissner leads LinkedIn's security and privacy strategy and is tasked with protecting member and customer data.
Career path
Kissner spent 12 years at Google, leaving as global lead of privacy technology. Kissner then served as chief privacy officer at Humu. In spring 2020, as Zoom faced a surge in usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kissner worked as a security and privacy consultant for the company to improve the security, privacy, and anti-abuse features of its products and systems. Kissner also served as director of engineering at Apple. At Twitter, Kissner began as head of privacy engineering before becoming Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President of Engineering, serving as CISO until November 2022. Kissner next served as CISO at cloud security company Lacework, bringing more than 20 years of experience in security, privacy, and anti-abuse work. LinkedIn's CISO appointment followed, with Kissner sharing the news directly on LinkedIn.
Public remarks and board work
Announcing the LinkedIn appointment, Kissner wrote, "Speaking as a heavy LinkedIn user I know that what we do here matters and I take that responsibility seriously." Kissner has described themself as an engineer and cryptographer by training. Kissner serves as a board member of the USENIX Association, a nonprofit supporting advanced computing systems communities.
While still Twitter's CISO, Kissner spoke at Stanford's Applied Cyber program in May 2023 on Metric Perversity, addressing how metrics can drive poor decision-making and discussing security practice at large companies in an open question-and-answer session. Kissner has also written for Dark Reading, including a May 2024 piece titled Security Teams & SREs Want the Same Thing: Let's Make It Happen, and an October 2026 piece titled Close Identity Gaps in Software Development Before Unleashing AI.
In 2026, Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute named Kissner, described there as CISO and Vice President at LinkedIn, the recipient of its Distinguished Alumni Award.
