Cerebras Bolsters Leadership Team with Appointment of New CISO, EVP of Worldwide Sales, and SVP of AI Cloud and Inference

Industry leaders Naor Penso, Alex Varel and Hagay Lupesko bring decades of experience from FICO, MongoDB, and Meta

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, today announced the appointment of Naor Penso as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Alex Varel as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, and Hagay Lupesko as Senior Vice President of AI Cloud and Inference. These strategic hires further strengthen the company's leadership team as it continues to innovate and accelerate the adoption of its groundbreaking AI hardware solutions.

"We are thrilled to welcome Naor, Alex, and Hagay to the Cerebras leadership team,” said Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Cerebras. “Their vast experience and proven track records in cybersecurity, sales, and AI will be instrumental in driving our mission to revolutionize the AI landscape. With their expertise, we are poised to continue delivering transformative AI technology and solutions that will empower organizations across the globe to achieve breakthrough performance and tackle the world’s most complex challenges."

Naor Penso – Chief Information Security Officer

Naor Penso joins Cerebras as CISO, bringing more than two decades of experience in cybersecurity leadership across both public and private sectors. An accomplished cybersecurity executive with deep expertise in building, growing, and leading large-scale security organizations, Penso brings a proven track record of implementing comprehensive cybersecurity strategies, ensuring regulatory compliance, and driving organizational resilience across diverse industry landscapes. In his most recent role as Vice President and Head of Product Security at FICO, Penso drove security adoption from the earliest stages of development through deployment, ensuring customers worldwide benefited from secure, resilient service. In his new role at Cerebras, Penso will lead the company’s security strategy, ensuring its AI technologies meet the highest standards of safety and trust.

Alex Varel – Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales

Alex Varel has joined Cerebras as EVP of Worldwide Sales, bringing a multi-decade wealth of go-to-market experience in high-growth, pre-and post-IPO environments. In 2015, Varel joined MongoDB leading teams in the Southern US and Latin America, helping drive growth leading up to their IPO. Post-IPO, Varel built Udacity’s global B2B business, contributing to its acquisition by Accenture. As GVP of the Americas at Zscaler, Varel led the Americas’ field teams during a period of rapid growth where Zscaler became a NASDAQ 100 and reached $2 billion in revenue. He most recently served as Chief Revenue Officer at Multiverse, one of Britain’s fastest growing tech companies. At Cerebras, Varel will lead global enterprise efforts to expand the adoption of the company’s AI solutions across diverse industries and markets.

Hagay Lupesko – Senior Vice President of AI Cloud and Inference

Hagay Lupesko has been appointed as SVP of AI Cloud and Inference at Cerebras. Lupesko brings more than two decades of industry experience in software engineering and machine learning. Prior to joining Cerebras, Lupesko was the VP of engineering at MosaicML (acquired by Databricks), Director of Engineering at Meta AI, and an engineering leader at AWS AI. Lupesko holds a Computer Science MSc from Tel Aviv University. In this new role, Lupesko will accelerate the development of Cerebras’ AI Inference and Cloud platform and offerings.

For more information about Cerebras job opportunities, please visit https://cerebras.ai/join-us/.

About Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems is a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, deep learning researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to accelerate generative AI by building from the ground up a new class of AI supercomputer. Our flagship product, the CS-3 system, is powered by the world’s largest and fastest commercially available AI processor, our Wafer-Scale Engine-3. CS-3s are quickly and easily clustered together to make the largest AI supercomputers in the world, and make placing models on the supercomputers dead simple by avoiding the complexity of distributed computing. Cerebras Inference delivers breakthrough inference speeds, empowering customers to create cutting-edge AI applications. Leading corporations, research institutions, and governments use Cerebras solutions for the development of pathbreaking proprietary models, and to train open-source models with millions of downloads. Cerebras solutions are available through the Cerebras Cloud and on premise. For further information, visit cerebras.ai or follow us on LinkedIn or X.