He is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Pendo, a venture-backed software company headquartered in downtown Raleigh. He started his career at Red Hat, where he worked as its first engineer and led the engineering team through the development of Linux, RPM and Anaconda and eventually, the company’s IPO. He later led product marketing at Red Hat and assisted in the acquisition and integration of nine other companies. Erik went on to found rPath in 2005, which sold to SAS in 2012.