James A. Beer has served as a director of Alaska Air Group since 2017, where he chairs the Innovation Committee and is a member of the Audit Committee. He is a veteran public-company chief financial officer with deep experience across airlines, technology, healthcare distribution and cybersecurity.
Mr. Beer served as CFO at Atlassian Corporation PLC, a publicly traded enterprise software company, from 2018 until his retirement in 2022. Earlier he was executive vice president and CFO for McKesson Corporation from 2013 to 2017 and CFO at Symantec Corp. from 2006 to 2013. From 1991 to 2006 he held several management positions, including CFO at AMR Corporation and American Airlines.
Mr. Beer currently serves on the boards of DocuSign, Inc. (audit and M&A committees), Zscaler, Inc. (audit committee), and privately held Redis (audit committee). He previously served on the board of ForeScout Technologies, Inc. from 2016 to 2020. He holds a BS in aeronautical engineering from Imperial College, London University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.