Life in the Swimlane with Kevin Mata, Director of Cloud Operations and Automation

Welcome to the “Life in the Swimlane” blog series. Here we will feature interviews with Swimlaners to learn more about their experience. This series will give you a preview of Swimlane, our culture, and the people who keep us going.

Hello! My name is Kevin, I’m the Director of Cloud Operations and Automation here at Swimlane. I was born and raised in San Diego and still currently live here. It’s difficult to leave a place where everyone comes to vacation, but maybe a new chapter is on the horizon.

I went to school at California State University San Marcos, where I received my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. I then worked as a Software Developer at a fortune 500 company for a few years and ended up finding my love for cybersecurity during one of their programs and shortly came over to Swimlane.

What does your job entail?

As the Director of Cloud Operations / Automation at Swimlane I’m in charge of automating our Security Operation Center. I also help run our Security Operations Center (SOC) team and make sure our cloud environments are secure. A few other things that I’m responsible for include but are not limited to Vulnerability and Patch Management, Third Party Risk, and many others. Overall, working with our internal teams to make sure we release a secure product to our customers. 

What do you enjoy most about working at Swimlane?

I love the culture here at Swimlane and I can’t forget about all the talented people that work here. I’ve also met some life long friends at this company and I’m forever grateful. 

What excites you most about your work? 

I enjoy being able to work with all different teams whether it is engineering, product, customer experience or most importantly working with some of our customers. I’m also still able to use some of my skills that I previously learned in software development to help automate our SOC. 

What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

When I’m not working you can find me at concerts or enjoying the outdoors. I just recently got into biking and have been having a great time exercising and enjoying going on bike rides every weekend.

What’s a fun fact about you many people may not know?

My love for house and techno music and going to music festivals. Music at these types of events brings everyone together and it’s so healing and therapeutic. 

Your motto or personal mantra:

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Three words that best describe you:

Genuine, patient, caring.

What Swimlane core value resonates with you the most?

Always be Leveling Up – I previously came from a more corporate company and I eventually got bored / stagnant of doing the same things. Working at a startup, processes and technologies are changing quickly and one needs to be able to adapt to change but overall it makes everyone better.

What type of impact do you want to leave on our industry?

Automate all the things!! I’d like to see more people in our industry automate more with our platform, especially with our low-code platform, it gives analysts the power to automate more and spend more time on investigating threats.