EP 16 — Mukund Sarma: How Chime Built a Scalable Product Security Program

Future of Application Security

Chime, one of the fastest growing players in the financial technology space, has a mission of providing financial stability for their customers by eliminating many of the issues that come with traditional banking.

In today’s episode, Mukund Sarma, Director of Product Security at Chime, shares how he helps his team address the challenges in building security programs, and maintaining a solid and proactive security culture within the company.

Topics discussed:

• How Mukund got started in cybersecurity.
• His experience in building application security programs for FinTech companies.
• Different approaches in risk mitigation in FinTech, product security, and application security.
• What product security is and how its definition differs from company to company.
• What skill set Mukund looks for when hiring engineering and security teams.
• How Chime’s internal Rails application, Monocle helps their team with strategic engineering and security decision making.
• Why Mukund opted for a gamified approach for their security processes.
• Why Mukund's team decided to integrate GitHub badges within Monocle.