Benjamin Knauss
CISO / CIO / CTO
A results-driven and innovative executive with sound experience in information security management, leading strategic initiatives to safeguard organizational assets and mitigate cyber threats. Expertise in regulatory compliance, risk management, incident response, and emerging technologies. Adept at establishing a robust risk management framework that enhanced resilience to emerging threats and ensured compliance with industry standards. Proven track record of success in fostering a culture of security awareness and resilience across diverse teams, driving innovation, and achieving measurable results.
Selected Accomplishments
- Designed keynote demonstrations for Bill Gates, by crafting and designing on-stage experiences during 2000 - 2001, elevating product visibility & innovation storytelling.
- Established a new Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CoE) in India from scratch.
- Translated complex technical risks into strategic executive decisions, securing $10M+ in budget approvals from C-suite stakeholders for system modernization.
- Drove a global cost optimization initiative by influencing CrowdStrike to unify its pricing model, resulting in up to 35% cost savings for customers worldwide.
- Reduced security incidents by over 40% by designing comprehensive multi-cloud security strategies across AWS, Azure, and GCP (NIST, GDPR, SOC 2).
- Engineered enterprise-wide cybersecurity improvements by leading the rollout of Proofpoint's email security platform, neutralizing threats across 2+ billion emails annually.
Professional Experience
Chief Information Security Officer, Fractional
RentAHuman.ai | San Francisco, CA (Mar 2026 - Present)
- Establishing the initial cyber security organization, working to de-risk the investment, consult with venture funding, and address the risk surface area of this AI forward startup.
Founder / CEO
RacterLabs | Dallas, TX (Jun 2025 - Present)
- Founded and currently operates this State Licensed, Digital Forensic Examination laboratory serving customers across multiple states. Providing expert digital forensic services to litigation search and legal counsel, insurance carriers, corporate security teams, and private investigative firms.
Chief Information Security Officer
RacterMX | Dallas, TX (Jun 2025 - Present)
- Founded the world's first MCP accessible Mail Forwarding SaaS Platform. Built out infrastructure in Iceland, a privacy first jurisdiction. Implemented SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TLS, TLS-RPT, MTA-STS, CAA, DNSSec, SRS, and DANE/TLSA technologies, along with Quantum resistant encryption. The system currently has 12,000+ paying customers.
Vice President, Security Engineering
News Corp | New York, NY (Mar 2019 - Jun 2025)
- Direct global technology and security engineering teams, directing enterprise-wide architecture, identity governance, access control, and data security.
Principal Cloud Engineer & Cloud Security Architect
Realtor.com | Santa Clara, CA (Nov 2015 - Feb 2019)
- Led enterprise-wide cloud architecture and championed the transition to zero-trust architecture (CISO), driving cultural and operational transformation.
Principal Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services | Seattle, WA (Sep 2014 - Sep 2015)
- Advised Fortune 500 C-suite leaders on enterprise-wide cloud transformation (CIO), DevOps strategy (CTO), and compliance programs.
Principal Cloud Architect
Computer Sciences Corporation (now DXC Technology) | Tysons, VA (Sep 2013 - Oct 2014)
- Advised C-suite leaders at F500 enterprises (Best Buy, Staples, Swisscom) on digital transformation (CIO/CTO), architecting the secure enterprise standards and cloud governance frameworks to accelerate their secure cloud adoption.
Director, Development Operations & IT / Principal Architect
Avalara | Bainbridge Island, WA (Jan 2008 - Feb 2013)
- Led AWS migration (Lambda/S3/CloudFormation) that reduced costs by 30% while ensuring 99.9% uptime for tax compliance SaaS. Embedded security into SDLC via automated guardrails (Akamai/Splunk), turning SSAE/PCI compliance into competitive advantage and slashing deployment cycles by 40%.
Firmware Engineering Manager
Portal Player | Kirkland, WA (Jan 2001 - Oct 2001)
Regional Director
Rainbow Technologies | Long Beach, CA (Jan 1999 - Jan 2001)
Director, Development Operations & IT / Principal Architect
Wolters Kluwer | Torrance, CA (Mar 1993 - Jan 1998)