Karen Walker

Chief Financial Officer Sysdig

Last Reviewed: September 27, 2026

Executive Summary

Karen Walker is Chief Financial Officer of Sysdig, the cloud security company founded in 2013 by Wireshark co-creator Loris Degioanni, a role she took up in 2021. She arrived with a career that runs almost entirely through the finance and accounting functions of fast-growing technology companies at or near a public listing: Corporate Controller at Uber during its pre-IPO scaling, Chief Accounting Officer and Treasurer at Pandora Media through its sale to Sirius XM, and Senior Vice President, Finance and principal accounting officer at NYSE-listed PagerDuty. The through-line is controllership, public-company reporting and transactions.

Career Highlights

• Chief Financial Officer of Sysdig since 2021, steering its growth and financial strategy.
• Senior Vice President, Finance at PagerDuty from March 2019, appointed its principal accounting officer in September 2019 and serving until May 2021; Sysdig credits her with building PagerDuty’s investor relations function.
• Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer of Pandora Media from June 2017 to March 2019, and Treasurer from July 2018, a period that included Pandora’s sale to Sirius XM.
• Corporate Controller of Uber Technologies from December 2013 to December 2016, where Sysdig says she scaled the finance team and led early IPO-readiness work.
• Earlier executive roles at CBS Interactive and Virgin America, according to Sysdig.
• B.B.A. in Accounting from Southern Methodist University.

Professional Journey

Walker trained in accounting at Southern Methodist University, where she earned a B.B.A. Sysdig’s biography of her describes more than two decades across corporate finance, accounting, compliance and investor relations, including executive roles at CBS Interactive and Virgin America, where it says she worked on the airline’s early IPO readiness.

The dated part of her record begins at Uber Technologies, where SEC filings show she was Corporate Controller from December 2013 to December 2016. Those were the years in which Uber grew from a venture-backed ride-hailing service into a global business, and Sysdig singles out her work scaling the finance team in that high-growth, multinational setting and preparing the company early for an eventual public offering.

In June 2017 she joined Pandora Media, then a listed music and podcast streaming company, as Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer, adding the role of Treasurer in July 2018. She stayed until March 2019, spanning Pandora’s sale to Sirius XM, which Sysdig describes as one of the M&A processes she helped drive.

She moved to PagerDuty in March 2019 as Senior Vice President, Finance. By September 2019 the incident-response software company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and that month its board formally appointed her principal accounting officer, and Sysdig notes that she built and led PagerDuty’s investor relations. She resigned in May 2021, effective 26 May, to pursue another opportunity.

That same year she became Chief Financial Officer of Sysdig, the San Francisco-headquartered cloud security company, which describes itself as born in open source and backs the Falco runtime threat-detection project. She has since appeared publicly on behalf of the company, including a May 2025 fireside chat at its San Francisco headquarters on cybersecurity as a boardroom issue. Sysdig’s leadership changed at the top in June 2026 with the appointment of Hatem Naguib as CEO; the company’s leadership page continues to list Walker as CFO.

Education

Southern Methodist University

B.B.A., Accounting