Career profile
Sebastian Welsh
Chief Information Security Officer, SwitchDin
- Role as of 8 December 2023, the date of the latest source
- December 2023
As of December 2023, Sebastian Welsh is the Chief Information Security Officer of SwitchDin, an energy technology company, having been appointed as its first CISO.
Career path
Welsh began his security career at Google, where he worked as a staff security engineer.
He later moved to the design platform Canva, where he served as Head of Security.
Across his career he has accumulated 17 years of experience as a leader specializing in building a whole-of-enterprise defense model within businesses.
In 2023, Welsh joined SwitchDin as the company's first Chief Information Security Officer, a position created to establish security frameworks for the company's emerging technologies.
Public communications on Canva security incidents
While serving as Head of Security at Canva, Welsh signed the company's public FAQ addressing a security breach that had occurred on 24 May 2019, after affected users were notified by the third-party breach-monitoring services haveibeenpwned.com and Firefox Monitor.
The FAQ explained that, as part of Canva's incident response, the company attempted to contact affected users by email and through in-app alerts.
Welsh also signed Canva's update on the Apache Log4j2 vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-44228, after the company was made aware of the issue on 10 December 2021.
That update stated that Canva had undertaken a thorough investigation confirming its desktop and mobile applications were not impacted, and had implemented layered mitigations to protect its systems and services.
It further noted that Canva was working with its service providers to ensure appropriate action was taken, and that no action was required from Canva customers at that time.
Remit at SwitchDin
At SwitchDin, Welsh's responsibilities center on establishing security frameworks for emerging technologies as the company's first Chief Information Security Officer.
His background spans engineering and enterprise security leadership roles at two large technology companies before taking on this position.
