Information Security Architect at AppLovin — which sounds very official until you realize the job is: worry structurally about everything, so nobody else has to. Born in Zagreb, financed and defended in Berlin.
I design information security for a living — currently as an Information Security Architect at AppLovin in Berlin. Before that I was Information Security Officer at auxmoney, and before I worried about other companies' data I was a developer and CTO at Kuelap, where I got to build things instead of just defending them. In plain language: I build the rails that keep systems and money moving, and the handrails that stop them falling off.
Security is a job where "boring" is the highest compliment — the quieter I am, the better it's going. But let's be honest about what it means in practice:
Education: M.A. in Theology from the University of Ljubljana, then a doctoral candidate in the Theology department at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Yes, the person defending your data studied theology — I even started a doctorate in it. It turns out "humans are fallen and will disappoint you" is basically the whole threat model.
Interests in one breath: music, art, religion, philosophy, business — and I can't actually keep them separate. My whole sense of the world is one big interconnected system, and I keep trying to write my way to the middle of it.
Somewhere in the corporate-detritus of my career there is a document called Leadership Philosophy: The Flow, full of words like "holistic" and "collective intelligence." Here is the honest translation:
Good organizations, like good rivers, are just water flowing downhill without getting stuck. My entire job is removing the boulders — the unclear messages, the silos, the fear, the unpatched server — and then getting out of the way and letting capable people work. I borrowed some of this from the Taoists (flow), some from the Buddhists (right speech), and most of it from Christianity's ancient, hard-won wisdom about how broken and how redeemable people are, all at once.
A leadership-and-security philosophy that rests on the conviction that systems work when the humans in them are treated like humans. It's possible this is less a philosophy and more me agreeing with everyone and calling it strategy. You decide.
I was born in Zagreb in 1974, back when the map still said Yugoslavia, and raised in New Zagreb — an eight-storey building full of kids, with summers spent at the family house on the Adriatic coast. I came up in a family of entrepreneurs who cared a lot about business, money, and real estate. My father was a WWII veteran, salesman, and manager; my mother ran her own business after the Yugoslav war cost her a job. From them I got the uncomfortable inheritance that money is a thing you build, and that you never get anywhere by waiting to be handed something.
That instinct went straight into the work. My early career (2000–2015) was fifteen-plus years of software development and IT consulting in finance:
People think security people and entrepreneurs are opposites. That's wrong — both are just adults refusing to leave the outcome to someone else, and both my families taught me that. The entrepreneurial one I was born into, and the one I built for myself.
I am a systems nerd who likes humans, a theology graduate who runs security, and a serious professional who will discuss at length the correct bass setup for maximum doomy tone. I've spent my career holding other people's secrets and my own children's attention, and I still cannot quite figure out how to talk to myself with the clarity I demand from everyone else. That, I suspect, is the real job — in disguise.
I keep six tabs of world wisdom traditions open at all times, and my spiritual practice is trying to remember that they all say the same thing.