1Password CTO Nancy Wang: Engineering is a process of beating constraints

When Nancy Wang was a girl, her dad was into metal.

Well, he was a metallurgy engineer—and for the 1Password CTO, that meant coming home from school and seeing him working with samples from his lab and a mass spectrometer.

Later, in high school, they worked on projects together, building model airplanes and learning about kinematics and energy conservation by “simulating a roller-coaster using wires and a real ball,” Wang told IT Brew.

“I remember building that out with him in high school,” Wang said, describing the experience as “a really interesting way to take the concepts from your textbook and make it alive.”

Background work. That STEM upbringing—her mother was a math teacher—gave Wang a solid background in computing and helped prepare her for a career in tech.

“That created that love of being able to build stuff, take stuff apart, and really understand how it all fit together,” Wang said.

Going to the University of Pennsylvania didn’t hurt either. After school, Wang joined the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped put together the nation’s digital health exchange. Positions at Deloitte, Google, and Rubrik followed before she joined AWS as director of product and engineering.

Contained. Constraints define engineering, but when it comes to software, the ability to throw more compute at the problem allows for new solutions. Wang said she sees the tech industry as one where constraints become malleable—and her work at AWS, from January 2019 to August 2023, was a chance to adjust the parameters of data protection as LLMs became more widely used. It was also critical to improve reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

“If you think about what it takes for an enterprise to have a true production-grade agent—which is you want to be able to observe the agent, you want to be able to write evals, so you can actually grade the agent on what you’re having it do, and then based on how it scores, then feeding that back into this essentially continuous learning loop—that’s RLHF,” Wang said.

Wang started at 1Password in March of 2025 as head of engineering and AI. Less than a year later, in January 2026, she succeeded outgoing CTO Pedro Canahuati. Her work at 1Password focuses on developing the product’s AI capabilities in a world where agents are taking a more forward role in the enterprise and need strict controls.

“We’re still doing, mainly, chatbot completions, multi-turn chatbots—you could extrapolate to a future where agents would be doing long-running workflows,” Wang said. “They would be doing complex multi-step tasks, and in order to enable that, you need to provide your agents with secure access.”

It’s all about finding ways around challenges and constraints, just like she learned at home all those years ago.

“Engineering is elegant solutions in the face of constraints, and we’re going to continue evolving as new types of model architectures are being created,” Wang said.