Shawn Wells

Shawn Wells

Shawn Wells is the Chief Security Strategist for Red Hat’s North American Public Sector organization. Shawn focuses on creating strategic approaches, frameworks, and technologies to elevate the competitive superiority of the U.S. Government’s Information Assurance capabilities.

This work often takes on difficult capability development collaborations between Red Hat and the U.S. Government. Utilizing rapid innovation that open source development enables, combined with an engineering rigor process, Shawn is responsible for producing mission quality technology for offensive and defensive purposes. Specifically, Shawn focuses on “Radical Innovations,” defined as technologies new to existence, and “Next Generation,” which push technology capabilities into completely different operating windows.

Prior to this role Shawn was the Director of Innovation Programs. Chartered with helping the Defense and Intelligence Community build innovation climates, Shawn engaged these communities in internal venturing and entrepreneurship to create and incubate new ideas and technologies. Shawn built a portfolio of emerging ideas and mission capabilities, and drove them into open source development projects for transition into formal government-industry partnerships.

Previous roles include serving as Technical Director for U.S. Intelligence Programs, where he oversaw Red Hat’s classified technical initiatives; Global System z Practice Lead, building a global practice for Linux on Mainframe; and formerly an Department of Defense civilian, Shawn worked on telecommunication systems.

Academic work includes Data Science at Harvard, technical strategy and innovation at MIT Sloan, and is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon’s CIO University.