rakeshkulkarni.com writing ↗

// hello, world

Rakesh Kulkarni

Cybersecurity. Fourteen years in. These days: securing systems that are starting to act on their own.

San Francisco Bay Area · 8.3 light-minutes from the nearest star · 37.77°N 122.42°W · sol-3 · local star: G2V

About

I've spent fourteen years in cybersecurity, the last eight leading it for whole lines of business — cloud, applications, and the partners a company depends on. My job, mostly, is to sit between engineers who want to move fast and executives who want to know what could go wrong — and make both of them right.

Lately that work has meant securing agentic AI: gateways for MCP, agent-to-agent controls, guardrails for RAG pipelines, and threat models for systems that act on their own. I believe security should be a business enabler, not a blocker, and I try to build it that way.

I hold an MBA from Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (Technology Strategy and Product Management), a BE in Computer Science, and CISSP and CCSP certifications. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Work

2017 — now

Nike

Sr. Principal / Director, Product & AI Security, Global Technology

I look after the security of a large portfolio of products — SaaS, cloud-native, on-premise — and wrote the enterprise AI security framework and Secure-by-Design architecture beneath a major digital transformation. Forty-plus engineering squads build on that work today, which is the measure I care about.

2016 — 17

Apple

Cybersecurity Specialist (Principal), Supply Chain Defense

Supply-chain defense, working across Product, GRC, and Engineering — third-party risk, SOX and ISO 27001. The supply chain was meaningfully safer when I left than when I arrived.

2007 — 16

Columbia Sportswear · IBM · Applied Materials

GRC & Supply Chain Security Architect · Security Manager · IAM Strategy Lead

Current focus

  • Machines that act on their own.
  • Systems that must not fail quietly.
  • Trust, built in before the launch.

Elsewhere

Active AI/ML security advocate with ISACA Silicon Valley. MIT Quantum Technology Professional, with an R&D focus on supply chain security. Off the clock I run a lot and coach youth soccer.