A Purposeful Mission and a Culture of Innovation Fuels Balbix

July 21, 2021 | 12 min read | Employee Spotlight

Our CEO and Founder Gaurav Banga recently shared a post (excerpted below, full post here) on LinkedIn which talked about how cybersecurity is now a big data problem.

“With the exploding enterprise attack surface, there are practically unlimited permutations and combinations of methods that attackers use to breach organizations. Enterprises have deployed dozens of security tools, which generate mountains of data. Infosec folks have to sift through massive vulnerability scans, attack simulation reports, app vulnerability results, cloud and IoT security alerts, outside-in scores, phishing test reports, and apply their knowledge of security controls to prioritize security issues that need to be addressed before they can be exploited by attackers. Of course, this takes time, and they miss stuff. This is an impossible job,” he wrote.

The Balbix mission, as described by Gaurav, is to address this challenge by building a platform that uses an ensemble of purpose-built ML algorithms to automatically extract actionable insights that help our customers reduce breach risk. The Balbix platform ingests and analyzes petabytes of IT, cybersecurity and business data to build and maintain a digital twin of the enterprise’s cybersecurity and risk state.

This post organically prompted several of our team members to share their stories of why they joined Balbix on LinkedIn. Needless to say, we were thrilled to see the variety of reasons and thoughts reflected by our team! Here are some highlights:

Phenomenal Innovation and Technology

Murali Bommana, Dir of Engineering

Here is my story about why I joined Balbix. Might be relevant to folks from networking companies. If you look at network packets and end point user data as gold mine, I spent a lot of time in my previous gigs transporting this gold ore to the extractors. So I wanted to get the gold and not just get paid for transportation and so here I am working on finding invaluable insights in the data.

Aravind Iyengar, Dir of Engineering

Growing up, I was always fascinated by technology — the things that scientists and engineers built and how they simplified life always intrigued me. I have always been eager to learn the newest algorithms and methods and use them to build things. Somewhere down the line, I realized that all technology is a means to an end, and it is the end that ultimately matters.

At Balbix, we’re applying the best of technology to a meaningful and worthy end — to revolutionize enterprise cybersecurity. At a time when data breaches, hacker-exploits, and ransomware are becoming daily occurrences and hacker groups becoming household names threatening the very core of our social, political, and economic structures, what better way to put these technologies to use? This is a problem that needs to be solved.

Feeding off petabyte-scale data from massively deployed sensors and connectors, built atop best-in-class distributed and cloud-native systems, and powered by state-of-the-art AI and statistical models, Balbix presents near real-time and accurate identification, quantification, and prioritization of risk issues before adversaries have a chance to exploit them. Our predictive platform allows customers to proactively devise and execute risk-driven security operations under any resource constraints, significantly reducing the chance of a cyberattack.

If you are an AI whiz and a problem-solver who gets excited by innovative applications of cutting-edge technology to solve meaningful problems, Balbix is the place for you! ?

Ti Saunders, Dir, Solutions Architecture

I joined Balbix for two reasons: the product and the people.

Getting to work on cutting edge technology that could realistically change the way organizations think about and manage their cybersecurity by correlating mountains of disjointed data points and effectively automating their cybersecurity posture? Bring it on!

I also got to speak with a lot of the team at different levels of the organization and was incredibly impressed by the competency of the leadership and the drive of the employees with a hard focus on the company’s mission.

If you’re in the market for a new gig and want the opportunity to work on something truly groundbreaking with extraordinarily talented people; I encourage you to apply.

Bill Niester, Principal Solutions Architect 

Before I joined Balbix, I was definitely tired of the same old, same old approach to security. Put up firewalls, slap in an IDS, install endpoint protection which basically all did the same thing, protect against what we already knew about. I was looking for innovation in the industry. I found it at Balbix. An amazingly deep machine learning/AI driven platform for automatically and contextually identifying assets and their InfoSec risk to an organization. Finding the unknown connections between assets and identifying their risk to the enterprise. I have had many, many years of IT and InfoSec experience, but I can honestly tell you I learn new things EVERY day at Balbix.

Paul Bernardin, Sr. Solutions Engineer

Everyone who looks at new hiring posts likely thinks the same thing: You won’t know what the role or company is like until you start. Should you really take that chance when you are pretty comfortable in your current role?

I can tell you first-hand that the same thing went through my mind until the interview process where I was impressed by both the technology and the entire team. The passion and drive to deliver the most complete and relevant technical solutions continues to blow me away. The overall breadth and depth of the platform is something I have not come across in my 25 years of Vulnerability and Risk Management. And the leadership of the executive team is terrific, while valuing the necessary contributions of all team members.

If you are serious about solving difficult customer problems in an amazing and upbeat culture, you will not regret applying for a role at Balbix.

Vinay Sridhara, CTO and Head of Engineering

Pieces of critical cyber security data is typically scattered all over the place. Until correlated, coalesced, and understood contextually, it is just another piece of data – there is no actionability. Here at Balbix we have an amazing team that innovates and executes daily with laser focus on converting data to information to knowledge in real time for all our customers. Let us know if you would like to work on the data problems that matter.

Sumanth Maram, Dir of Technology

As engineers and leaders, we want to work with like-minded people who share similar thoughts towards work, mission, and goals.

At Balbix, we work on hard problems with an increasing number of Fortune 100 companies. I am fortunate to be part of this growth with respect to company and career, and I have immense faith in our ability to succeed. The methodologies we are adopting are the latest ML/AI algorithms and techniques. Innovating with AI in cybersecurity with (very) big data differentiates us from other approaches to cybersecurity (including many recent acquisitions and new startup launches in this space).

Transparency, voicing individual opinions, and open floor conversations with our CTO and CEO brings the best out of each individual. There are constant opportunities for learning and mentoring to help building leadership skills.

Who wouldn’t want to work in this environment?

Pratyush Mathur, Cloud & DevOps Engineer

I wanted to embark on a new journey with a disruptive mission filled with the next-level challenges, accelerated learning and tremendous growth and I am so stoked that I found my calling in Balbix where we continue to build world class infrastructure & platform with a perpetual effort to achieve operational excellence with passionate engineers and industry leaders.

Tyson Williams, Regional Sales Director

This company is absolutely phenomenal from end to end, right from the superb technology to a leadership team to lead it to anywhere imaginable. A technical organization with thee drive and capability to accomplish things I’ve literally never seen before in my 20+ years in this industry. I thought I was going to be a part of something great when I joined and now I know I am somewhere that values their employees and customers/partners every bit as much as their own success and growth.

A Vibrant, Collaborative Culture

The recurring theme that emerges in all our team member’s reflection is one of a warm, inviting, vibrant culture shaped by the values we hold dear. Every day, it is inspiring to work with talented and passionate people who bring their full selves to the table. There is always that buzz of excitement and energy reverberating through the office, with people ever ready to teach and learn from each other.

As Gaurav concluded in his post, “AI/ML architects, data engineering experts, devops gurus, consider joining Balbix. We have a mission for you. Remember that attackers are probing organizations that you rely on every day, for vulnerabilities and phishable users, and the drumroll of ransomware, supply chain attacks and stolen data continues. Don’t wait too long…get in touch!”

Check out the open career opportunities here:

https://www.balbix.com/company/careers/