Snyk CEO Peter McKay is stepping down as soon as the company can find a more AI-savvy chief executive to replace him. 

In a LinkedIn post on Thursday, McKay said “After nearly a decade of building and leading Snyk, I’ve decided the time is right to find my successor and Snyk’s next CEO.” McKay said he had the full support of the company’s board to find “a leader with deep roots in product innovation and AI.”

Snyk started as a developer-focussed security company finding and fixing vulnerabilities across open-source code, containers, and cloud environments. McKay joined the board in 2016 and became CEO in 2019.

Recently, the company has shifted its focus to AI (cue: gasp) with its AI-native SAST tool Snyk Code surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue in late 2024. 

CEO at security wartime 

McKay told Runtime in 2024 he’d adopted a “war time” CEO mentality to navigate the industry’s shift from selling individual tools to platform offerings – or customers wouldn’t get out of bed. 

He steered the security company through two rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023 and what he calls a “monumental pivot” to become a forerunner in AI security. (Snyk was the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for its application security testing products which manage AI-powered remediation and AI risk detection.) 

However, McKay doesn’t feel he is the right person to lead the company through the next  “era of hyper-intensive AI innovation.” 

“This next chapter requires a visionary, AI-immersed leader ready to commit their full energy to a multi-year journey of technical disruption,” the CEO said. He will help find his replacement and said he remains a big supporter of the company, in what appears to be an amicable parting after a decade at the helm. 

Founder UNO reverse

McKay’s departure appears to be the complete opposite of Snyk founder Guy Podjarny’s exit from the company almost a year ago. In March 2025, Podjarny stepped down from Snyk’s board to pursue his new AI startup Tessl. 

Podjarny said during the State of OpenCon last February, he was “drawn into the world of AI,” adding, “I’m an addict and I wanted to get back to an entrepreneur path on it.” 

Podjarny founded Snyk in 2015 and was the CEO prior to McKay. Tessl, which markets itself as an agent skills and context management platform, raised $125 million in November 2024. The company didn’t launch its first products until September 2025: a Spec Registry and the Tessl Framework. Both products are now live.

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