Speakers
![](https://virtuoso-media.govexec.com/media/events/551/speakers/photo-20231006212112-Peter_Chestna_Headshot_BW.png)
![](https://virtuoso-media.govexec.com/media/events/551/speakers/photo-20231006212112-Peter_Chestna_Headshot_BW.png)
Pete Chestna
CISO of North America
Checkmarx
Pete Chestna serves as the CISO of North America at Checkmarx, where he provides customers and prospects with practical advice for building successful application security programs. Bringing more than 15 years of direct AppSec practitioner experience, Pete has held roles ranging from developer and development leader to his most recent position as the Global Head of AppSec for the Bank of Montreal where he was responsible for the security of thousands of applications.
Over his years as a software engineer and engineering leader, Pete has led organizational transformations from Waterfall to Agile to DevOps and from monolith to microservice architectures. He is certified as both a scrum master and product owner. Stemming from his experience as both an avid practitioner and consultant, Pete has spoken internationally at numerous prominent security and developer conferences including DevOpsDays, All Day DevOps, OWASP AppSec, and DevSecCon.
Pete has been granted 3 patents. He enjoys whiskey tourism, astronomy, model rocketry and listening to Rush in his spare time.