Snowflake Appoints Mayank Upadhyay as Chief Security & Trust Officer

At Snowflake, security is foundational and engineered into the platform from day one, not treated as an afterthought or a bolt-on addition. As AI systems become more powerful and pervasive, security is critical to prevent misuse, safeguard sensitive data, and maintain trust in automated decisions. 

As Snowflake continues to advance its security and trust strategy, enterprise security veteran Mayank Upadhyay, recently joined Snowflake as Chief Security & Trust Officer to lead this area of important work. 

In this role, Mayank owns the full arc of security at Snowflake, breaking down the traditional boundaries between corporate defense and product engineering. The hyper-connected landscape of the agentic era demands dynamic, intelligent protection as systems interact in novel ways. Mayank’s mandate addresses this by bringing Snowflake’s internal enterprise and product platform together as a single, unified security foundation.

By architecting and deploying AI-native controls across both environments simultaneously, this organization isn't just securing Snowflake. It is establishing the enterprise blueprint that empowers organizations to innovate fast and safely harness agentic AI without compromising their data.

In the era of AI, this foundation has never been more critical. “Security isn’t a feature, it’s the difference between AI being a competitive advantage and an existential risk,” said Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of Engineering at Snowflake. “Mayank has spent his career solving some of the hardest security problems at scale. That’s the kind of depth and skill this work demands as we help enterprises navigate the most consequential shift in enterprise technology in a generation.”

Mayank brings one of the most influential careers in enterprise security to Snowflake. During his more than two decades at Google, he shaped the modern security landscape, ultimately serving as Vice President of Engineering for Google Cloud where he secured both the public-facing Google Cloud Platform and the private cloud infrastructure powering core Google services. Prior to this, his career progression to Distinguished Engineer was defined by a sequence of foundational technologies he delivered. 

In the early days of Google, he embedded core security controls into its precursor to Kubernetes. Next, as the first engineer on BeyondCorp, he helped build the pioneering zero-trust architecture that redefined enterprise network security. He then transformed the realm of authentication — leading the rollout of two-step verification when multi-factor authentication was still emerging, and championing the evolution from security keys to passkeys, which is now the industry gold standard.

Over his entire career, from these early foundations to securing global hyperscalers, one core philosophy has driven his work: security only succeeds when it is seamlessly integrated and frictionless for the user. 

The work is already underway — and Snowflake couldn’t be better positioned for what comes next.