Patreon has confirmed it has laid off five employees from its security team.
Emily Metcalfe, a former senior security engineer at Patreon, said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: “So for better or worse, I and the rest of the Patreon Security Team are no longer with the company.” According to a tweet, Metcalfe joined the company in November 2021. Metcalfe could not be reached for comment.
In a brief statement to TechCrunch, Patreon’s U.S. policy head Ellen Satterwhite confirmed the five layoffs but declined to answer our questions, or say how many employees it had on the security team prior to the layoffs. Satterwhite did not dispute that the entire team had been laid off.
Satterwhite would not say for what reason Patreon laid off its security engineers, but added that the company works with external organizations to “develop our security capabilities and conduct regular security assessments.”
Following the news of the layoffs, security professionals across the industry began posting open job listings for those who lost their jobs at Patreon. Thousands of tech jobs, including cybersecurity, have been lost this year across the tech industry, fueled in part by over-hiring and corporate mismanagement.
Patreon is a website that lets content creators offer monthly payment subscriptions for their customers in exchange for a 5-12% cut. The company, founded in 2013, says it has 250,000 creators on its platform. In 2015, Patreon confirmed a data breach involving the personal information of its customers.
Disclosure: The author of this article runs a Patreon for his side newsletter.
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