Press releases

SAN FRANCISCO (March 12, 2020)-- Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), provider of a global edge cloud platform, has appointed Nick Rockwell as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Laura Thomson as Vice President of Engineering. The pair bring more than 30 years of combined experience transforming and growing global engineering teams, and will focus on scaling Compute@Edge and investing in Fastly’s security portfolio to give developers the freedom to push complex logic closer to end users quickly, securely, and reliably.

“One of my goals as a leader is to deliver on a mission that makes it easier for other innovators to build,” said Joshua Bixby, Chief Executive Officer at Fastly. “Experienced, mindful, and diligent leaders are key to accomplishing this, so I’m honored to bring on two brilliant engineering leaders that will guide development of our serverless compute and security offerings, and who deeply care about empowering developers to build far more advanced applications at the edge.”

Nick Rockwell joins as Senior Vice President of Engineering with 20 years of experience in product development and information security at top media publishing companies. Previously, Rockwell served as Chief Technology Officer at The New York Times, where he led the company’s digital transformation through a massive re-architecture of its website and other product offerings – including the company’s onboarding to Fastly’s edge cloud platform.

“I know first-hand the impact Fastly’s technology has on the internet, having driven the transformation of The New York Times’ digital business, so I’m thrilled to help many more companies improve their end users’ experience,” said Rockwell. “In addition to working on critical projects that extend our edge computing and security work, like Compute@Edge, I feel strongly about fostering a structure that maximizes the impact of each Fastly engineer. I look forward to being part of a culture that values openness and integrity, and that rallies around the shared goal of building a trustworthy internet.”

Fastly also welcomes Laura Thomson as Vice President of Engineering, who brings 12 years of experience leading large-scale engineering teams at Mozilla. There, Thomson led a team of over 100 engineers responsible for development, data, operations, and security of services, systems, and tools to support Firefox. Thomson said, “It’s been incredibly inspiring to see how much Fastly really cares about developers, both outside and inside the company. I’m deeply connected to Fastly’s mission to support and lift developers up, and am excited to further that mission through the projects my teams and I will drive.”

This news comes on the heels of Fastly’s launch of Compute@Edge, a powerful language-agnostic, serverless compute environment with greater security, more robust logic, and new levels of performance. Rockwell and Thomson will help lead the teams working on Compute@Edge, while empowering Fastly’s engineering arm to optimize systems while preserving performance, security, and reliability.