Merritt is a security executive based in Miami, FL. She serves as Field CISO at Lacework, a cloud security unicorn, and serves as an advisor to a number of young companies including expanso (container orchestration and compute at the edge, based on open source protocol bacalhau). She advises executives on cloud security and go to market, from Fortune 100 banks, to biotech start-ups. She also helps inform the Lacework product pipeline of security threat detection and contextualization capabilities, based on practitioner feedback and the security landscape.

Previously, Merritt served in the Office of the CISO at Amazon Web Services for over five years. She served on a small team as a Deputy CISO to help to secure AWS infrastructure, at vast scale. She also used this experience to provide security expertise to significant AWS customers, and in 2022, she moved over $2B of deals across the line where security was a blocker. She was AWS Security’s most prolific public speaker, hosting her own Twitch show “SecurityLIVE!