Adrian Ludwig

Chief Security Officer Rippling

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Adrian Ludwig is Chief Security Officer of Rippling, the San Francisco company that runs HR, payroll, IT and spend management for businesses on a single platform and has raised $1.8 billion from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia and Bedrock. He was appointed in March 2026 to lead global security strategy across product security, infrastructure protection, trust and risk management. What distinguishes his career is the scale of the systems he has been responsible for and the unusual route in: recruited by the US Department of Defense at sixteen after describing himself as a hacker, put through college on the department’s money, and set to work finding flaws in cryptographic and network systems. He went on to secure the early web at Adobe, to run Android security at Google when the platform was already measured in billions of devices, to serve as Atlassian’s CISO and then Chief Trust Officer, and most recently to act as Chief Architect and CISO at Tools for Humanity, building privacy-preserving proof-of-human identity infrastructure. Rippling is a consolidation play holding payroll data, identity and device management for its customers simultaneously, which makes the security role unusually load-bearing.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Rippling’s Chief Security Officer on 10 March 2026, with a remit spanning product security, infrastructure protection, trust and risk management globally.
• Described by Rippling’s chief technology officer, Albert Strasheim, as having built security for technologies used by billions of people and millions of businesses.
• Served as Director of Android Security at Google, where he helped shape the mobile security model — application sandboxing, platform hardening and at-scale malware detection — for a user base in the billions.
• Joined Atlassian in May 2018 as Chief Information Security Officer, held that role for around three years, and then became Chief Trust Officer with responsibility for security, risk and compliance, and privacy across a cloud business.
• As Chief Architect and CISO at Tools for Humanity, led one of the more ambitious efforts in the industry to build privacy-preserving, global proof-of-human identity infrastructure.
• Built out security capabilities earlier at Nest, Adobe and Macromedia, spanning connected consumer hardware and the browser-plugin era of the web.
• Spoke at Black Hat USA and Black Hat London in 2015 and has appeared at RSA Conference, making him one of the more publicly visible platform-security leaders of the period.
• States his aim at Rippling as making world-class security an invisible, reliable constant for customers so they can move faster with complete confidence.

Professional Journey

Ludwig’s entry into security was not through a graduate programme. By his own account he was a hacker as a teenager, and the US Department of Defense recruited him at sixteen. The department funded his college education and then employed him for several years after graduation, finding security flaws in cryptographic systems and computer networks. That is an unusually direct apprenticeship in offensive security, and it precedes the commercial career rather than following it.

His private-sector work began in the era when the security problem was the browser and the desktop plugin. He built out security capabilities at Macromedia and then Adobe — the two companies that, through Flash and Acrobat, owned much of the attack surface of the early web. He subsequently worked on security at Nest, the connected-home hardware business, where the problem shifted from documents to devices in people’s homes.

The role that made his reputation was Director of Android Security at Google. Android’s security model had to work across a fragmented device ecosystem operated by manufacturers and carriers Google did not control, at a scale of billions of handsets, with a third-party application marketplace as the main distribution risk. He is credited in Rippling’s announcement with shaping the modern mobile security model in that post.

In May 2018 he moved to Atlassian as Chief Information Security Officer. He held that role for roughly three years before becoming the company’s Chief Trust Officer — a title change that reflects a wider job: security, risk, compliance and privacy considered as one customer-facing promise rather than as an internal engineering function, which is the shape the role takes at a company selling cloud software to enterprises. He most recently served as Chief Architect and CISO at Tools for Humanity, where the technical problem was building identity infrastructure that can establish a person is human and unique without holding the data that would normally be needed to prove it.

He joined Rippling in March 2026. The fit is legible: Rippling’s single-platform model means one vendor holds a customer’s payroll, employee identity, device fleet and corporate spend at once, so the company’s security posture is effectively its product risk, and the announcement framed his brief in exactly those terms — product security, infrastructure protection, trust and risk management, globally.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

M.B.A.

Williams College

B.A., Mathematics