Aaron Rinehart joins LeaderSpeak to discuss the origins of Verica, the principles behind chaos engineering, and his work extending those principles into cybersecurity. The conversation connects technical resilience with the practical challenges of explaining, funding, and growing a company around an emerging discipline.
Aaron has worked on engineering problems for organisations including the US Department of Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense. At UnitedHealth Group, where he served as chief security architect, he created the open-source ChaoSlingr project to explore how chaos engineering could strengthen security. He later co-founded Verica with Casey Rosenthal, who helped create chaos engineering at Netflix. Aaron also co-authored an O’Reilly report on security chaos engineering with Kelly Shortridge.
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Aaron defines chaos engineering as proactively introducing turbulent conditions to discover how a system or service may fail before that failure affects customers. Verica extends this approach through what the company calls continuous verification, applying experiments and observability to systems including Kubernetes and Kafka.
The goal is not to create random disruption. It is to find hidden brittleness under controlled conditions. Mature legacy systems often feel dependable because incidents have gradually revealed where their assumptions were wrong. Chaos engineering attempts to accelerate that learning without waiting for expensive outages or breaches.
Aaron views security as part of the system rather than a separate layer. Controls can experience latency, degradation, and failure just like any other component. Meanwhile, engineers continuously change software to deliver customer value, but security controls may not evolve at the same rate.
Security chaos engineering probes that divergence. By introducing a condition that a control is expected to detect or prevent, teams can verify whether the protection still behaves as intended. This provides evidence about the actual system rather than relying only on its design or documentation.
One of Verica’s recurring business challenges is messaging. Investors, customers, and the wider market each need a different explanation of value. The word “chaos” can also create the false impression that the practice is about recklessly breaking production. Aaron and Rosenthal spend significant time reframing it as an orderly, practical method for learning where system boundaries lie.
This communication challenge is particularly important for a new category. Verica has worked from customer pain rather than building a product in isolation and assuming the market would want it.
Aaron describes a clear division of responsibilities with his co-founder: Rosenthal concentrates heavily on engineering while Aaron handles much of sales, marketing, and operations. Hiring, venture funding, and determining the right runway are continuing entrepreneurial concerns.
The company was distributed before the pandemic. That offered experience with remote work, but Aaron learned that people across regions can communicate differently even when they share a language. Verica has therefore had to be deliberate about communication, social connection, and building a team that reflects a broad range of backgrounds.
