Meet the Vanta Enterprise Engineering Team

As Vanta continues to grow and deliver new capabilities to our leading trust management platform, we’re excited to share more about our own Security, Enterprise Engineering, and Privacy, Risk, & Compliance teams from the teams themselves. In today’s post, you’ll meet Alicia Phan, who leads Enterprise Engineering at Vanta.

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What does the Enterprise Engineering team do at Vanta?

As an Enterprise Engineering team, our mission is to enable our employees to do their best work. We realize this is broad (and ambitious!), which means there’s a variety of things we handle on a day-to-day basis. 

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Also known as the Corporate Engineering or IT team at other companies, our team provides essential internal operational support, manages our employee lifecycle, and partners closely with internal teams such as our Security and Privacy, Risk, & Compliance to keep Vanta safe and secure. To help improve how our internal teams work, we help automate (and eliminate) manual processes where possible. We also partner with our Workplace team on complex projects such as office builds to ensure employees have what they need within our physical offices. 

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While we’re handling all these various responsibilities across Vanta, we also try to have a good time and operate with a healthy sense of humor—and help make sure we’re identifying and tackling opportunities that help support and enable our employees!

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How does the team work?

Each quarter, we get together as a team to determine our top goals and to understand what we'll need to do to achieve these. We share our goals broadly for feedback, and ask all our partner teams if there’s anything in their plans that we can help them with. Once we gather our goals and understand any objectives of partner teams where we may be a dependency, we prioritize these to compile a list of our projects for the quarter.

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Like Vanta’s Security team, we try our best to build a culture where employees want to come to us for help—and there’s no task too big or small to ask for our help on! To streamline this for all Vanta employees, we provide multiple, easy ways to reach our team:

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• Internal Slack channel for time-sensitive asks 
• Internal ticketing system to submit requests 
• Office hours, held multiple times a week
• Team email address for any external communications

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How is the team structured?

Our Enterprise Engineering team is comprised of a small group of generalists with a wealth of experience working across environments ranging from startups to large enterprises. 

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This makes our areas of expertise both broad and deep, and enables us to tackle a wide range of work. Our focus includes four key areas:

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IT Operations/Digital Foundation: This is what you’d expect from a typical IT team, including IT logistics, user lifecycle management, and end-user support.

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Systems Engineering: Within this area, we help integrate tools and find opportunities to automate and reduce manual work—with the goal of making Vanta more efficient. 

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Corporate Security: We partner closely with our Security team to help keep Vanta secure. This includes helping to manage our identity provider, managing our MDM, performing regular access reviews, and assisting with DLP policies. 

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SaaS Procurement: We partner closely across the business on understanding our business needs, translate these into technical solutions, and work with cross-functional stakeholders to procure new tools. This process involves partnering with our vendors, negotiating contracts and terms, and integrating the tool once purchased. 

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Where is the Enterprise Engineering team based?

Our team spans across the United States—quite literally! From California to New York, our geographical spread helps ensure we’re able to meet Vanta’s business needs and handle any urgent questions whenever they arise.

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What excites the team about Vanta and its product?

Internal IT teams don’t typically have a chance to interface with the product; they primarily work with internal teams, vendors, and stakeholders. But what’s most exciting about Vanta and its product is that we’re also internal customers of our own Vanta instance. 

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This is significant because we’re able to interface with our own product daily as well as provide valuable feedback as customers, and more importantly, help that feedback come to fruition. One recent example is partnering closely with our Product team on Vanta’s Access Reviews product. Not only do we have a chance to perform multiple roles internally, but we love having the opportunity to play the role of a customer—and help improve Vanta for all our customers as well. 

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Any fun facts about the Vanta Enterprise Engineering team?

• We start every day with a fun gif—though we’ll see who posts it first!
• Our hobbies are wide-ranging, from photography to DIY home projects, and playing golf.
• We love to eat together, and are always on the hunt for ideas for our next team lunch!

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Join Vanta’s mission to secure the internet and protect consumer data—learn about our open roles!