A long and varied career led Tariq Shaukat to code security

Coding takes a lot of time and work to get right. AI can speed things up, but at what cost?

For executives like Tariq Shaukat, CEO of code security platform Sonar, the demands of a coding environment that balances the speed of AI with the associated cybersecurity threats can be tiring. But Shaukat himself has a varied professional background that makes striking that balance much easier.

“I’ve been very fortunate in my life and my career to have been able to witness and hop on a number of different trends that were out there,” Shaukat said.

Keeping tabs. Now he’s watching as startups and established companies alike use AI to write complex code and reach benchmarks. Increasingly sophisticated models make this possible, but issues of code complexity and an expanding attack surface can’t be overlooked.The reliance on AI may also leave teams unable to grasp their own code.

“It’s becoming so that no one understands it, nobody can read it, nobody knows how to maintain it, and what’s going to happen to us a year down the road?” Shaukat said. “It’s a set of issues—security, reliability, maintainability—that come into play.”

Despite those concerns, Shaukat believes the speed with which code can be written now is an overall good, one that could erase the bottleneck in software development. But with more code there are more issues, needles in ever-growing haystacks, that must be found.

“Those needles in the haystack are things that you need people who speak code to be able to understand and verify the code and debug the code and fix the code,” Shaukat said.

Background information. Shaukat has been working in the tech sector for decades. He told IT Brew that experiences working for famed Silicon Valley marketer ​​Regis McKenna led to an early role at McKinsey in the dot-com boom as a developer and later on the end user side. After seven years with the consulting firm, he went to Caesar’s Entertainment, where he was chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer for four years.

“I got to see firsthand how hard it is to actually get value out of technology,” Shaukat said.

Shaukat’s next decade has been defined by more tech-centric roles. He joined Google Cloud from 2016 through 2020 as president before taking on the same role at dating app Bumble for three years. In the summer of 2023, he moved to Sonar, where he remains today, as CEO.

Those experiences, he told IT Brew, were helpful in assessing the state of the tech industry. His whole career has been on “the leading edge of data analytics and machine learning,” whether in entertainment or tech.

“One of the things that’s been very helpful is seeing things from multiple sides, like the end user piece when I was a buyer and user of technology, and then coming back over to the vendor side and having that level of empathy and understanding,” Shaukat said.