Thomas Jacob

Dynamic and Visionary Product Engineering Executive with over 25 years of deep-rooted expertise in building and scaling market-leading enterprise security products for the on-premise and cloud environments. Proven leadership track record at global technology giants including Cisco and Trellix/McAfee Enterprise, with 15+ years dedicated to cultivating, mentoring, and scaling high-performing, multi-disciplinary product organizations across India, US and EMEA. Product Engineering Leadership: End to end ownership of network security products-roadmap planning, execution, architecture, quality, reliability and performance benchmarks of Next-Gen Firewall, IPS and NDR. Product Lifecycle Management: Led hardware refresh cycles, planned Compliance and Certification needs, negotiated OEM partnerships, managed Product Roadmaps, Escalations and Sales engagements. Cross-Functional Leadership Excellence: Expert at bringing a broad set of contributors—including Software, Hardware, Threat Research, Program, and Product Management—to reliably deliver high-quality products on schedule. Domain Expertise: Firewall, IPS, NDR, Security Management & Monitoring, Rule and Anomaly based detections, DPI, TLS, High speed & low latency hardware assisted data-path and traffic load-balancing, Identity, Endpoint security, Cloud Native Architecture, DevOps. Fostering Innovation: Highly skilled at guiding architects to translate complex problem landscapes into pragmatic architectures and back them as they navigate through uncertainties to achieve overarching business objectives. People Management: Effectively managed 100-300 member product teams of diverse functions, multiple products and different time zones. Operational Excellence & AI Acceleration: Passionate about engineering processes and the integration of AI tools to supercharge feature velocity, elevate product quality, strengthen security posture, and drive organizational productivity