Rick has a rich career spanning over 25 years in the tech industry, starting as an engineer in Silicon Valley companies like SGI and Netscape. He then transitioned to larger enterprises such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Montgomery Securities, and Merrill Lynch, where he honed his skills in engineering large-scale, highly distributed systems with high security requirements. Rick's entrepreneurial spirit led him to found several startups as CTO, focusing on enterprise systems management, behavior-based security, virtual machine hyper-scale, and cloud management technologies. He served as Chief Architect at Intuit before joining Atlassian in the same role, where he continues to apply his passion for designing and solving large-scale systems and mentoring others.