Starburst hires Paras Malhotra as CISO

Starburst has appointed Paras Malhotra as chief information security officer. He will lead the company’s information security, governance, risk and compliance (GRC), and product security teams across its SaaS and on‑premises offerings.

Malhotra joins Starburst with more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, compliance, privacy and risk management at cloud and SaaS companies. He most recently served as senior director of information security at Datadog.

At Datadog he headed the information security organisation, focusing on customer trust, proactive risk management and continuous security monitoring to support growth across commercial and enterprise markets.

Before Datadog, Malhotra spent nearly a decade at Amazon Web Services in senior security roles, including principal manager for AWS Security Assurance. In that role he worked on engineering strategy and security assurance initiatives aimed at improving vulnerability detection, risk assessment and compliance at scale.

At Starburst, Malhotra will work closely with engineering, product and go‑to‑market teams to strengthen the company’s security posture and to support AI and data security requirements in customer deployments.

Jitender Aswani, Starburst’s senior vice president of engineering and security, commented, “As enterprises scale AI and modernise data infrastructure, security and trust are central concerns. Paras brings experience building and scaling security programs at cloud and SaaS companies, and his leadership will support our enterprise customers.”

Malhotra said he was attracted by Starburst’s role in enterprise data and AI projects and intends to reinforce security, privacy and governance foundations so customers can deploy new capabilities with more confidence.

The hire comes as organisations increase focus on data governance and protection while adopting AI and updating data infrastructure.