Rob Lefferts is corporate vice president of Microsoft Threat Protection. His org is responsible for Microsoft Defender and Sentinel products, which ensure end-to-end, comprehensive, and cohesive Microsoft security protection for all of our customers.

Since joining Microsoft in 1997, Rob has been instrumental in shaping key products and technologies, from helping develop the original SharePoint Portal Server, to hardening the Windows platform and driving commercial adoption of Windows 10, to leading extensibility efforts for the Office platform, advancing the vision for Microsoft 365, and now leading a key team within Microsoft Security.

Rob began his career at Claritech, a startup that was born from a Carnegie Mellon research project in informational retrieval and natural language processing. He earned a bachelor’s degree in logic and computation, as well as a master’s degree in computation linguistics, from Carnegie Mellon University.