Meet Gus! 👋

Gustavo Gonzalez is an engineering manager and he’s been at Vanta since January 2021. 

Tell us about your role at Vanta.

As an engineering manager I have many of the typical responsibilities: supporting my team members as they develop their careers, collaborating with product and design teams on our engineering product strategy, and regularly meeting with sales and customer success teams to ensure that our work meets customer needs. At the same time, with my infrastructure background, I am actively involved in our infra on-call process and forward-looking engineering foundation planning. Last and most importantly, I am the engineering lead for New York; currently a major area of focus for me is building out the engineering presence for our NYC office.

If you could go back to the start of your career, what advice would you give yourself? 

Rather than stressing over future plans years from now, focus more on understanding what you enjoy about the work you are doing today. It took me years to develop a solid framework to better understand the aspects of my job that I really enjoy. Once I developed this framework I had a much easier time deciding where I wanted to go next in my career.

Why did you choose Vanta over other companies? 

This is my first startup job and a big part of my decision-making process was to find a new opportunity where I could participate in all aspects of the company’s strategy—understanding customer problems, working with product counterparts to translate those problems into engineering projects, and finally supporting our customers as they navigate the product. The opportunity to participate in the full lifecycle was a major decision point in my choice to join Vanta. 

Why are you excited about Vanta’s space and industry?

Having participated in SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance audits in the past, I personally felt the pain and immediately saw the need for more software to automate the process—taking something that previously was completely manual and making it automated. The continuous monitoring aspects of Vanta also stand out to me. During previous SOC 2 audits, I felt a large amount of pressure leading up to the audit; it felt like every year we were starting over again. With continuous monitoring you can tackle issues throughout the year rather than letting problems linger and become findings during audit. 

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What’s been your favorite quarantine activity? 

Like many people, I picked up some new hobbies during quarantine. First, I bought a road bike and started taking longer bike rides. I completed my first century (100-mile bike ride) and have enjoyed cycling as an opportunity to check out neighborhoods and nearby towns. I also really love Mexican food, so I have spent much of quarantine learning to make corn and flour tortillas—which has been surprisingly easy to start but difficult to master. 

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be? 

My wife and I really love to travel and our favorite country to visit is Ireland. We’ve spent multiple weeks touring all over the country over the years. The scenery is beautiful, it’s easy to get around (assuming you’re comfortable driving on the left!), and the people are friendly and welcoming.