Kara Sprague, chief product officer at F5, was named CEO at San Francisco-based cybersecurity company HackerOne.

Sprague spent the past seven years at Seattle application delivery giant F5, and became an executive vice president in 2019. She was named CPO in December 2022.

HackerOne offers bug bounty, pentesting, code security audits, spot checks, and AI red teaming products. The company, founded in 2012, raised a $49 million Series E round in 2022.

HackerOne’s customers include Coinbase, General Motors, GitHub, Goldman Sachs, Hyatt, PayPal, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sprague will replace longtime CEO Marten Mickos on Nov. 4. “This is phenomenal news for HackerOne, for ethical hacking, and for the whole industry,” Mickos wrote on LinkedIn.

Sprague, who is based in Seattle, previously spent 13 years at McKinsey and was a member of the technical staff at Oracle. She is a board director at Trimble, a publicly traded tech company.

“As CEO, I plan to expand our platform capabilities in service to enterprise customers, invest in and grow our community of security researchers, and continue to foster trust with customers, partners, and the researcher community,” Sprague said in a press release.

— F5 announced its own executive changes on Tuesday, naming three new leadership roles in its C-suite.

• Tom Fountain was promoted to chief operating officer. He was previously executive vice president of global services, and chief strategy officer.
• Chad Whalen is now chief revenue officer. Whalen was previously executive vice president of worldwide sales.
• Kunal Anand is now chief technology and AI officer. He was previously chief technology officer.

F5 also said it is conducting an external search to replace Sprague.

“Kara is an incredible leader who has made innumerable contributions to F5, including serving as a driving force behind our successful transition to a software-led business,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou said in a statement. “In her leadership roles at F5, Kara has been instrumental in expanding and evolving our solutions portfolio with a constant focus on what matters most for customers. We wish her the very best in her future role.”

— Taimur Rashid is returning to Amazon Web Services in a new role leading the Generative AI Innovation and Delivery team. Rashid previously sent nearly a decade at AWS in various leadership positions.

“During my time away I got broad industry perspectives at Microsoft, Redis, and several startups,” Rashid wrote on LinkedIn. “And now the opportunity to lead at AWS again feels like a homecoming, with the exciting challenge of shaping the future through generative AI. This technology is not just a new platform but a shift in how we think about and implement solutions at scale.”

— Michelle Seitz, former CEO of MeydenVest Partners and former chair and CEO of Russell Investments, joined the board of Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Seitz is also on the boards of MSCI Inc., Sana Biotechnology, and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

— Bellevue, Wash.-based game company Valve Software hired Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond, co-founders of Seattle studio Hopoo Games, along with other employees from the startup. Read more.