John Amaral (CTO and co-founder @ Root.io) joins us to discuss the evolving role of engineering leaders and why vision-first leadership & building your “vision” muscle is more critical than ever. We dive into why “shift left” is dead and why SaaS is being replaced by “do-it” as a service. John also unpacks how to think in outcomes, apply the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework to eliminate toil, and reimagine product experiences. Plus, we look inside Root.io’s approach to building AI-native security products that ship daily. Whether you’re rethinking your org design or exploring the frontier of AI-powered engineering, this episode will reshape how you think about building, leading, and scaling teams.
John Amaral, CTO and co-founder of Root.io, is a veteran cybersecurity leader with a proven track record of scaling and exiting successful companies. At Cisco, he led Product for Cloud Security—its fastest-growing Security and SaaS business. Before that, he ran product and engineering at CloudLock through its acquisition by Cisco in 2016. Earlier, as SVP of Product at Trustwave, John led its industry-leading security portfolio, culminating in a strategic acquisition by Singtel. Today, he’s building Root.io—a next-gen cybersecurity platform pioneering Agentic Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) to automate and eliminate software vulnerabilities at scale.
ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/