Our leadership

Nat Friedman is CEO of GitHub, and drives the company’s vision of a global community of developers building the future together. Nat is passionate about building products that delight developers, and is a long-time leader in the open source community. He has co-founded two companies: Xamarin in 2011, where he served as CEO through acquisition by Microsoft in 2016, and Ximian in 1999. He is also co-founder of AI Grant, the GNOME Foundation, and co-founder and chairman of California YIMBY. Nat lives in San Francisco with his wife, daughter, and three dogs.

Erica is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at GitHub. Erica joined GitHub in 2013 to develop the operational foundation for scaling the Sales and Customer Success Team. Prior to GitHub, Erica spent over four years at ServiceSource International in Business Excellence and Operations, where she focused on sales strategy and operations for enterprise customers. She also worked in financial planning and analysis in the healthcare sector.

When Erica isn’t talking to companies about GitHub, she’s watching football or trying new restaurants in New York with her family.

Keith Ballinger is GitHub’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, where he leads the global engineering organization.

Keith has an extensive background in engineering and product development. Prior to joining GitHub, he held leadership positions at Microsoft and Xamarin. At Microsoft, he led the teams shipping Azure DevOps, App Center, and the internal-focused 1ES initiative, designed to improve the systems, process, and culture that power software development at Microsoft. At Xamarin, Keith was VP of Product.

Keith has also led engineering teams at a number of startups. He is passionate about building teams and shipping software.

Erica Brescia is GitHub’s Chief Operating Officer, where she leads the business development, support, and workplace teams. Prior to joining GitHub, she was the COO and co-founder of Bitnami, where she was instrumental in leading the team's business development efforts with all of the leading cloud platform providers. Erica’s leadership in the technology space extends to serving on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, as well as being an Investment Partner in X Factor Ventures, which empowers female-led businesses to succeed.

When Erica isn’t leading operations at GitHub, she loves going to the farmer’s market, cooking, working out and laughing hysterically with her husband and their hilarious son.

Tyler Fuller is GitHub’s General Counsel, where he leads the company’s Legal, Policy, and Social Impact teams.

Tyler has been a technology lawyer for over 20 years. He started his practice at the law firm of Howard, Rice in San Francisco working with local and national technology companies. He then joined Microsoft where he led diverse teams providing a wide array of strategic legal, corporate, and external affairs services in the United States and around the world. Tyler has played a key role in Microsoft’s evolution to become a major supporter and contributor to open source software. He continues to support Microsoft’s efforts in open source, developer tools, cloud services, and global data center infrastructure.

Outside of his legal pursuits, Tyler spends an inordinate amount of time playing tennis and chauffeuring around his three kids.

Laura Heisman is GitHub’s Vice President of Communications & Corporate Marketing, where she leads the company’s global communications and corporate marketing team. Laura has been integral in building out GitHub’s global brand awareness strategy and defining the company’s storyline to showcase the platform, community, and new developer opportunities.

Prior to joining GitHub in 2017, Laura spent more than a decade at Citrix as Vice President of Communications leading the worldwide communications program. Before Citrix, Laura led corporate communications at Interwoven and was with leading PR agencies representing startup and global companies.

Laura is passionate about the power of communications and raising awareness about how open source and GitHub are changing people’s lives and the future of software, including the impact it will have on her own children’s future.

Shanku Niyogi is GitHub’s Senior Vice President of Product, where he leads the teams responsible for GitHub’s product roadmap, including product strategy, management, and design.

Shanku has had a career-long passion for building products that empower developers and software teams. Prior to joining GitHub in January 2019, Shanku led developer product teams at Google, Microsoft, and Chef and was involved in products such as Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, ASP.NET, and Google Cloud.

When he’s not building products at GitHub, Shanku enjoys travel, photography, poetry, and time with family.

Carrie Olesen is GitHub’s Chief Human Resources Officer, where she oversees the company’s HR Business Partners, Talent Acquisition, Employee Experience, and Workplace Services teams. Carrie is passionate about scaling GitHub’s global business in its next phase of growth, and continuing to focus on diversity, inclusion, and belonging at the company.

Previously, Carrie worked on the Mergers & Acquisitions team at Microsoft, and led various areas of global HR, including bringing incubation businesses forward to start new categories. Prior to Microsoft, Carrie was General Manager of a private staffing company in the Pacific Northwest.

When Carrie is not leading the HR team at GitHub, she enjoys traveling, skiing, and hiking with her family.

Kelly Stirman is GitHub’s Vice President of Strategy & Product Marketing, where he oversees the company’s Global Product Marketing and Integrated Demand Generation Teams, including Product Marketing, Field Marketing, and Demand Generation. Kelly is passionate about developing strategy and vision for developer products.

Prior to joining GitHub in 2019, Kelly was Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Strategy at Dremio, where he helped launch the company. Before Dremio, Kelly was responsible for strategy, product marketing, and sales enablement at MongoDB..

You can find Kelly running the trails of the Bay Area, skiing just about anywhere, cooking, making ice cream, roasting coffee, all with his amazing wife and three kids.

Mike is GitHub’s Chief Financial Officer. He oversees our Strategic Finance, Accounting, Deal Desk, Tax and Treasury, and Business Systems Teams. Mike is passionate about growing both GitHub’s business and impact on the world.

Prior to joining GitHub in 2017, Mike spent nine years at Tesla in a number of executive roles including Vice President of Finance and Treasurer. Mike raised over $8 billion and helped expand Tesla’s operations around the world. Before Tesla, Mike served as CFO at both Tropos Networks and Benchmark Capital.

On the weekends, you can find Mike testing how many miles he can hike vertically with his wife and two sons.

Jason Warner is GitHub’s Chief Technology Officer. In his role, Jason oversees the Office of the CTO, whose mission is to explore the unknown and non-existent aspects of technology and software in order to build a map of GitHub’s future.

Jason was previously Senior Vice President of Technology at GitHub, where he has played an integral role in scaling the Engineering, Product, and Security Teams, and building GitHub’s product roadmap to fit the needs of developers around the world.

Prior to joining GitHub in 2017, Jason was Vice President of Engineering at Heroku. Before Heroku, Jason oversaw Product Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Phone at Canonical.

Jason is passionate about building technologies that bring people together, and he’s an active speaker, writer, and advisor.