Slack Appoints Company’s First Chief Security Officer And Chief Architect

Slack just slated a former Palantir exec for its new Chief Security Officer position and an Ex-Facebook employee, who worked on the company’s AI efforts, for its newly created role of Chief Architect.

Geoff Belknap will be filling the role of Chief Security Officer at the popular office chat client. He previously worked as the Chief Information Security Officer of Palantir, a company that prioritizes security quite a bit thanks to its highly sensitive clientele. At Slack he will be devoting himself to physical and information security at the company in addition to overall security policy.

The new role of Chief Architect will be filled by Keith Adams, whose main responsibility will be Slack’s overall technical architecture and the technologies that compose it. Adams is joining Slack after nearly 7 years at Facebook, where, among other things, he co-founded Facebook’s AI Research. A position where, according to his LinkedIn, he was responsible for “engineering systems that can learn from Facebook’s enormous piece of the visual, textual, acoustic, and social worlds.” Adams also previously worked as a Senior Staff Engineer at VMWare.

It’s an interesting hire that comes at a time when Slack may be getting more serious about the artificial intelligence of their systems and features like Slackbot, which Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told the Wall Street Journal in August he wanted to see get significantly smarter.

A representative from Slack told me in an email that while Adams role would be focused on the overall technical architecture of Slack’s platforms and systems, he would likely also be working on endeavors involving the company’s AI and machine learning efforts.

Slack has been growing insanely quickly since its founding just three years ago. The company has raised just shy of $340 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and Accel, according to CrunchBase, and the company now boasts 2 million daily active users. These new positions will undoubtedly help the company maintain security and stability as the company rapidly scales.