Philip Martin

Philip Martin has joined Uber as chief information security officer, according to SecurityWeek, which reported the move without giving Martin's exact start date beyond its own report date. He arrives at the ride-hailing company from Coinbase, where his RSA Conference biography describes him as chief security officer responsible for the physical and cyber technology, processes and team that safely store a large share of the world's cryptocurrency holdings.

Career path

SecurityWeek says Martin served as Coinbase's chief security officer since April 2016, leading a global team of more than 250 employees across cybersecurity, trust and safety, physical security, technology governance, risk and compliance, and business resilience for the exchange's consumer and enterprise businesses. The RSA Conference bio adds that under his stewardship Coinbase safely stored more than $25 billion in crypto without a breach or loss of customer funds, and that he also managed one of the largest and most comprehensive insurance programs of its type covering a breach.

Before Coinbase, Martin built and led the incident response and security engineering teams at Palantir Technologies and worked on new virtual infrastructure at Amazon's A9. Earlier still, he spent a decade as a US Army counterintelligence agent and Arabic linguist, serving in tactical and strategic roles both in the United States and overseas.

Why he took the Uber job

Martin explained his reasoning in a LinkedIn post that SecurityWeek quoted directly: "What drew me here is simple: very few companies are responsible for real people moving through the real world at Uber’s scale, every minute of every day." In the same post, he contrasted the assignment with data-focused security work, saying Uber's security function also protects trips, riders, drivers and couriers rather than data alone.

The two sources reviewed do not describe Martin's title or duties at Uber beyond CISO, so this profile does not speculate on the shape of his new mandate.