- Steve Erickson and Paul Murphy will serve as vice presidents of engineering and sales respectively to support the company’s innovation and growth
- The new hires bring proven policy and open source experience to help Styra expand its rapidly growing customer base
Styra, Inc., the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leaders in cloud-native authorization, announced two strategic hires to its senior leadership team. Steve Erickson and Paul Murphy will serve as vice presidents of engineering and sales respectively to support the company’s innovation and growth. It also also shared its 2020 results, including over 300 percent growth year-over-year, 90 percent headcount growth and record-breaking open source success with OPA.
The new hires bring proven policy and open source experience to help Styra expand its rapidly growing customer base, support the OPA community and provide more teams access to Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), giving them guardrails for Kubernetes and microservices.
Bringing deep policy security expertise to the engineering team
Steve Erickson will be bringing deep policy security expertise to the engineering team as VP. In his time as an engineering leader at Illumio, Erickson was responsible for end-to-end policy management, distribution and enforcement capabilities within the Illumio Core and Illumio Edge products. Erickson held engineering leadership roles at Juniper Networks and a Juniper divestiture, Pulse Secure as well.
Erickson said, “I’m so thrilled by the opportunity to accelerate feature and product updates for Styra DAS, so more OPA users can manage policy at scale across their cloud-native environments. Styra DAS and OPA fill an important policy and security gap within the cloud-native stack, and I’m looking forward to growing and scaling our engineering team to meet the demands of a market that is maturing quickly and has clearly reached a major inflection point.”
Murphy comes to Styra with a strong cloud-native background. In his role with FOSSA, Murphy was the head of global sales. Before that, he ran sales for Sysdig. Additional past experience includes a variety of executive and leadership roles at DataCore Software, VMware and Netapp.
Murphy added, “Styra is a rocket ship, and I’m thrilled to be on board and part of the team that built both OPA and Styra DAS. I am passionate about the speed, automation and portability that cloud-native can provide, and I’ve helped countless companies make their digital transformations and embrace the cloud. Here at Styra, I’ll be helping our customers get more from OPA, so they can move to the cloud while also minimizing risk, mitigating errors and ensuring that deployments are both secure and compliant.”
