Ben Thurgood | Head of Customer Engineering, Public Sector
Google Cloud

Ben Thurgood is the Head of Customer Engineering for Public Sector at Google Australia. A distinguished leader, he has held leadership roles at Google, AWS and IBM. He and his teams have guided customers in Australia and globally to use technology to their advantage, focusing on mission-critical outcomes.  Ben’s commitment to the Public Sector is a core driver of his career. He believes deeply in supporting the mission of government agencies, a passion that was solidified during his time as Lead Architect for the NSW Department of Justice, and has extended to National Intelligence and Defence, as well as to work with Federal and State Government agencies.  A passionate technologist at heart, Ben is an expert in the application of advanced machine learning to business and government challenges and has a background in software engineering. Ben holds a Masters of IT from Queensland University of Technology where his research topics focused on cryptography and distributed operating system design.