In this episode of Make Yourself @ Work, Matt Tverberg sits down with Delia Midamba, Director of Physical Security at Saronic, an Austin-based defense technology company building autonomous vessels for the U.S. Navy. Before Saronic, Delia built and led security programs at Splunk, Cloudflare, and Cohesity, and started her career as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. State Department.
Delia shares what it's really like to build a security program from scratch at a company where the stakes are national defense. That means navigating trade compliance, multi-site consistency, and protecting technology that real lives may one day depend on.
She dives into how she manages visitor compliance workflows, keeps security consistent across multiple sites, and balances a frictionless employee experience with the requirements of a regulated environment. Some key lessons from the conversation include: security works best when it enables the business rather than blocks it, consistency across sites reduces risk and creates a better employee experience, and the biggest security variable is always human behavior.
This episode is a must-listen for physical security leaders, workplace and operations professionals in regulated or defense environments, and anyone building a security program at a fast-scaling company.
Connect with the guest and host on LinkedIn!
Browse the latest episodes of Make Yourself @ Work
How Samsara Builds Offices Worth the Commute
Caitlin Steininger, Director of Workplace Operations at Samsara, joins Envoy's Matt Tverberg to make the case that workplace teams are the COOs of employee experience, and the hardest problems aren't physical, they're operational.

Mission-Critical Security Playbook: from NASA to Tools for Humanity
From NASA's Johnson Space Center to the company behind the Orb and World ID, Alan Mather has built security programs where the stakes don't get higher. He joins host Matt Tverberg from Envoy to unpack the real-time accountability gap, why the secure path must be the easiest path, and what modern workplaces get wrong about identity.
Navigating the Future of Global Workplaces with Julian Sera from Cytokinetics
What does it take to run workplace operations in some of the world's most complex environments? Julian brings lessons from Apple, Tesla, Merck, and now Cytokinetics to the conversation.