The executive business partner who keeps a fast-moving cybersecurity company's CTO on the rails.
Huntress // Executive Operations & Strategic Support // Winston-Salem, NC
At Huntress, the security company that watches over more than a hundred thousand small and mid-sized businesses, the threat hunters get the headlines. Culleen Linzmeyer sits one seat over - Senior Executive Business Partner to the Chief Technology Officer - in the chair where strategy gets turned into something that actually happens on a Tuesday.
It is a role most people only notice in its absence. When a launch lands on schedule, when a leadership offsite runs without friction, when a CTO's week is sequenced so the important beats the urgent - that is the work. Linzmeyer has done a version of it for more than a decade, and she has done it across industries that look nothing alike.
Start with the resume that refuses to pick a lane. She wrote and edited travel-deal copy at DealBase. She ran the desk for a Vice President of Human Resources at BB&T, the regional bank. She supported a CEO and CFO at Oakbrook Solutions in wealth management. Banking, travel, finance, and now cybersecurity - four worlds, one constant skill: being the person executives trust with the details that decide whether the strategy survives contact with reality.
The throughline is trust. You do not hand someone your calendar, your board prep, and your unfinished thoughts unless you believe they will handle them better than you would. Linzmeyer has spent her career being that person, and at Huntress she does it for the technical leader of a company that has raised roughly $332 million and now employs more than 600 people.
There is a quieter detail that tells you who she is. Among her credentials - a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, an Associate of Arts and Sciences, a Nova Chief of Staff certificate, a graduate certificate in Virtual Team Leadership - sits a graduate certificate in Forensic Genetic Genealogy. That is the DNA-and-cold-cases discipline that has cracked decades-old criminal investigations. It is not on the job description. It is on her transcript anyway.
People who collect skills like that tend to share a wiring: they are curious past the point of usefulness, and then the usefulness shows up later. An executive partner who can run a forensic genealogy case is an executive partner who is very good at reconstructing a messy situation from scattered evidence and arriving at the right answer. The hobby and the job rhyme more than they seem to.
Executive Assistant to the Vice President of Human Resources. Learning the rhythm of a regulated, people-heavy institution.
Executive Assistant to the CEO and CFO. Supporting two of the most demanding seats in a numbers-driven business.
Editor and Copywriter. A detour into words and marketing that sharpened the editorial eye she still brings to executive communication.
Joined as an Executive Business Partner, then promoted to Senior Executive Business Partner to the CTO - the strategic seat she holds today.
Huntress was founded in 2016 and built around an unfashionable idea: that small and mid-sized businesses deserve the kind of security operations usually reserved for the Fortune 500. From a base near Columbia, Maryland, it grew into a managed detection and response company spanning endpoint protection, identity threat detection, security awareness training, and a 24/7 security operations center.
The momentum shows up in the numbers. A $150 million Series D in June 2024 pushed total funding to roughly $332 million. The company now runs at around 100,000 customers and more than 600 employees. That growth produces exactly the kind of organizational complexity that makes an excellent executive partner indispensable - more meetings, more priorities, more places for a CTO's attention to leak away.
Linzmeyer's seat is at the center of that pressure. Aligning resources, coordinating projects, sequencing decisions, protecting focus - the unglamorous machinery that lets a technical leader stay technical instead of drowning in logistics. In a company whose entire promise is reliability, the person who makes leadership reliable is doing brand-aligned work.
There is a tidy story you could tell about Culleen Linzmeyer - decade of executive support, steady climb, well-earned promotion. It would be accurate and it would miss the interesting part.
The interesting part is the breadth. Most people in operations roles specialize and stay. She kept adding rooms to the house: a banking desk, a wealth-management desk, an editor's chair, a chief of staff certificate, and a forensic genealogy credential that has nothing obvious to do with any of it. The pattern is not indecision. It is appetite - the kind that makes someone good at walking into an unfamiliar problem and finding the thread that pulls it straight.
That is what an executive business partner actually sells. Not stenography. Judgment, range, and the willingness to learn one more thing because it might matter later. In a field where the headline jobs go to the people chasing threats, Linzmeyer occupies the quieter seat that makes the chase possible - and she got there by being curious about everything, including the things that were not, strictly speaking, her job.
Profile compiled from public professional sources including LinkedIn, The Org, and Huntress company information. Where dates or details were not publicly available, they have been omitted rather than estimated.