Career profile
Paras Malhotra
Chief Information Security Officer, Starburst
- Current role, per sources checked 27 September 2026
- 3 June 2026
Paras Malhotra is the chief information security officer of Starburst, an enterprise intelligence platform that announced his appointment in June 2026.
Starburst's own security documentation page, live as of this writing, still lists him in the seat.
Career path
Malhotra joins with more than 20 years of experience designing, building and scaling security, compliance and privacy programs for high-growth SaaS and cloud-native companies.
Immediately before Starburst, he was senior director of information security at Datadog, where he led the company's information security organization with a focus on customer trust and proactive risk management.
Before Datadog he spent nearly a decade at Amazon Web Services in senior security roles, including principal manager for AWS Security Assurance, where he led engineering strategy and the product roadmap for security assurance initiatives across AWS infrastructure.
The Starburst role
At Starburst, Malhotra leads information security, governance, risk and compliance, and product security across the company's SaaS and on-premises offerings, partnering closely with engineering, product and go-to-market teams.
Starburst's senior vice president of engineering and security, Jitender Aswani, said of the hire: "As enterprises scale AI and modernize their data infrastructure, security and trust have never been more critical."
In a later interview, Malhotra described the company's approach to access control as an additive layer that sits above each connected data source, so that a query blocked by that layer never reaches the underlying system even though the source itself separately enforces its own permissions.
He also told the interviewer that Starburst tiers its vendor risk reviews, giving full scrutiny, including SOC 2 Type II results and penetration-test findings, to partners that process customer data or connect deeply into the platform, while lower-risk vendors get a lighter annual review.
The company's own materials do not give the exact dates of his AWS or Datadog tenures beyond the durations quoted above.