Meet Mikko, Information Security Specialist at Wolt

The Security team at Wolt is a welcoming, enthusiastic bunch of 12 and growing 🚀. Small, but mighty, the team is building up a lot of our security policies and practices from scratch and most importantly, doing it the Wolt way: laser-focused on their customers and efficiency. And they of course have some fun on the side as well — we heard a lot of them are food enthusiasts!

We chatted with Mikko, one of our Information Security Specialists about life in our security team. Mikko has been at Wolt for over a year and a half and comes from a security consulting background. He joined Wolt as he was looking to move into an in-house security role, where he could be involved in building things from scratch. In his spare time he keeps busy with floorball, video games and playing guitar. He’s also hoping to set up his own home recording studio for the tunes. 🎸 🎶

Let’s hear from Mikko how his experience at Wolt has been so far…

Hello 👋 Tell me a little bit what you do at Wolt.

As an Information Security Specialist my work mainly revolves around things to do with compliance and business continuity. In a nutshell, this means working with lots of different teams at Wolt, helping them with creating contingency plans and preparing Wolt for any disasters before they might hit us 🕵 .

What’s the security team like at Wolt?

Considering that we’re over 7,000 people globally at Wolt, our Security team is still pretty small so we get to build a lot of interesting things from scratch and have a high focus on automation to make sure we work effectively. We need to scale with the company, which brings about fascinating challenges. Because everything is moving so fast, there’s never a dull day at Wolt.

In our team we’re really laser-focused on our customers: the people of Wolt. We always make sure to come across approachable and have a no-blame culture. If something goes wrong, we always figure it out together rather than point any fingers. We’re also obsessed with security solutions that have great customer experience and I think what we’re doing really reflects that. We always do things the Wolt way, and look to find the best solutions for our people and tailor our ways accordingly. 💙

What’s been your favorite project at Wolt and why?

My favorite project at Wolt so far has been our ISO 27001 certification project, which started even before I joined the company. In my previous line of work I audited a lot of companies that wanted this certification and it was a sweet sweet payoff when we managed to get it for Wolt as well. While the bulk of the prep work was done within the team, there were at least two dozen people in various Wolt teams that helped us along the way. Gave us a good reason to throw a big party. 🎉

What’s been the nicest piece of feedback your team has received?

We had a project on implementing our new VPN solution for our engineers and it was a pretty challenging and time-consuming project with lots of moving pieces. When we finished the project and rolled the solution out our engineers were really appreciative of our efforts. The solution was faster, easier to use, more secure and versatile and we had a bunch of really great feedback we received — it made all the effort worth it. 😊

What’s been your biggest learnings at Wolt?

Definitely the level of ownership we have at Wolt. I was familiar with the concept of high ownership teams before, but at Wolt this has been on a totally new level for me. If you’ve ever read “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink or “Team of Teams” by Stanley McChrystal, you’ll know what I mean. We apply ownership to everything — from personal commitment to leading projects to developing new business verticals from scratch.

At Wolt you get a lot of freedom and trust to do things in the way you believe is the best for solving the problem at hand. Micromanaging is not a thing here — getting things done is the way to prove that you’re worth your salt. But you’re not left alone, if you run into any problems, there are a ton of talented people ready to help you out. Getting to work with my teammates and engineers has been a great learning experience.

What are you most excited about in your work right now?

Currently I’m working on an eLearning safety training course for our Wolt Market employees. We’re rapidly expanding to new markets with our dark store concept, which comes with increasing physical security and safety risks - and we have to be ready for them. 🛡️ In the long-run I just really love the variety of things we get to do. We have visibility and deal with all the areas of Wolt (which is a lot!). One day you might be helping create training to improve awareness of phishing for our customer support teams and the next week you’ll be preparing for DDoS attacks. What I love the most about my job is the versatility and opportunity to get to work with so many different types of people here. 🙌