John Martinez

John Martinez is a technologist, speaker, and creator with 30+ years in systems engineering, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity. He got his start deep in Unix and Linux, and has spent the last 16 years in the cloud, mostly on the security side of it.

As a practitioner, John built cloud automation, DevOps, and security and compliance solutions at Netflix and Adobe. He landed at Netflix in 2010, running AWS workloads before Chaos Monkey existed and back when "cloud security" was still a debate rather than a discipline. He went on to lead an innovations and solutions team at Palo Alto Networks, evangelized cloud security at Evident.io, and served as Technical Evangelist at StrongDM before its acquisition by Delinea, where he continues that work today. His focus now sits at the intersection of identity, privileged access, and AI: zero standing privilege, just-in-time access, and the messy new question of how you give an autonomous agent an identity you can actually hold accountable.

John speaks for a living and writes constantly. He has presented at RSA Conference, Identiverse, meetups, and customer sessions worldwide, and publishes regularly on access, identity, and cloud security. He hosts two podcasts: Grounds for Access, Delinea's identity security show where he trades candid takes with CISOs and practitioners, and Los Nerdys, his independent show at the intersection of latinidad and nerdiness, featuring latiné and allied voices in tech.

Underneath all of it is one goal: getting students and early-career technologists into rooms they were never handed a key to, especially the ones who didn't inherit the network. He mentors, coaches, and speaks on campus panels through organizations like Techqueria, because someone did that for him.

John is based in the Bay Area, where he pulls a lot of espresso, still DJs, and parents two computer science kids.