01Owns
Threat modelling
Walks through new features with the team before they are built, maps trust boundaries and data flows, and agrees which threats need a control and which are accepted.
Hire · Security
Hire Cybersecurity Engineers
Senior cybersecurity engineers who join your engineering team to find weaknesses early, fix them with developers and keep your cloud, code and access controls in good order. Each candidate has threat-modelled a sample product, reviewed a pull request with planted flaws and explained the findings in order of business risk.
Paid threat-model and code review exercise
Senior, lead and principal levels
Works with your developers, not around them
On your team
What a cybersecurity engineer owns on your team.
02Owns
Secure code review
Reviews changes touching authentication, payments, file handling and user input, and leaves comments developers can act on without a security background.
03Owns
Cloud and identity hygiene
Audits IAM roles, storage permissions, network exposure and secret handling, then removes standing access that nobody can justify.
04Owns
Vulnerability management
Triages scanner and dependency alerts, discards the noise, assigns real issues to owners with a deadline and checks the fixes actually landed.
05Owns
Incident readiness
Writes and rehearses the runbook for a suspected breach: who is called, which logs are preserved and how customers or regulators would be informed.
Vetting
Skills we test before a cybersecurity engineer joins.
01Tested
Application security
Deep familiarity with the OWASP Top 10 and ASVS, including access control flaws, injection, server-side request forgery and insecure deserialisation.
02Tested
Threat modelling methods
Uses STRIDE or attack trees pragmatically, keeps models short enough that teams update them, and links each threat to a test or control.
03Tested
Cloud security
Least-privilege IAM, logging with CloudTrail or equivalents, encryption key management and guardrails such as service control policies in AWS, Azure or GCP.
04Tested
Pipeline security
Adds static analysis, dependency and container scanning, and secret detection to CI without blocking every build on low-severity findings.
05Tested
Detection and logging
Decides which events are worth alerting on, writes detection rules that fire rarely and meaningfully, and knows how to investigate a suspicious login.
06Tested
Risk communication
Ranks findings by likelihood and impact, explains them to non-specialists in plain terms and proposes the cheapest control that genuinely reduces the risk.
Work sample
How the cybersecurity engineer work sample runs.
- 01Step 1
Threat-model a feature
The engineer receives a design for a file-sharing feature with public links and produces a threat model listing trust boundaries, the top threats and proposed controls.
- 02Step 2
Review a seeded pull request
They review a change containing an insecure direct object reference, a missing rate limit and a logged secret, and write comments a developer could fix from.
- 03Step 3
Assess a cloud account
Given an exported IAM and storage configuration, they rank the riskiest exposures and propose fixes in the order they would apply them. The work is paid.
- 04Step 4
Brief a non-technical owner
They explain their top finding to a founder in five minutes, including what an attacker could do and what fixing it would cost the team.
Levels
Cybersecurity Engineers: what changes at each level.
01Level 1
Senior
Covers application and cloud security for one product, runs threat models and reviews, and handles day-to-day vulnerability triage.
02Level 2
Lead
Sets the secure development standards, chooses tooling for the pipeline, coordinates penetration tests and owns the incident response plan.
03Level 3
Principal security engineer
Shapes security architecture across products, such as identity strategy, tenant isolation and key management, and advises leadership on risk appetite.
Other options
When to hire someone other than a cybersecurity engineer.
01Consider
Your infrastructure is unmanaged
If servers, deployments and access are still set up by hand, a DevOps engineer should automate them first so security controls have somewhere to live.
Open register02Consider
Security is one item in a wider technical gap
If you need someone to set overall technical direction and security is only part of it, start with fractional CTO support.
Open register03Consider
The risk sits in your Azure estate
If most exposure is in Microsoft identity, subscriptions and policy, an Azure specialist will reach it faster.
Open registerSecurity hires succeed when developers want them around
A security engineer who only files tickets and blocks releases soon gets routed around. The ones who make lasting progress sit close to the developers, review early designs rather than finished features, and fix some issues themselves. In interviews, ask how a candidate handled a team that pushed back on a finding.
Strong answers describe trade-offs: a compensating control while the proper fix waited, or a risk formally accepted by the owner with a date to revisit it.
A scanner report is not a security programme
Automated tools find known vulnerable dependencies and common misconfigurations, and they produce long lists. The engineer’s value is deciding which items matter for your architecture and which are unreachable. Broken access control, for example, rarely shows up in a scan at all and is found by reading code and understanding how tenants are separated.
Which level to hire first
A senior engineer suits a company with one main product that needs reviews, cloud clean-up and triage. Choose a lead once there are several teams, customer security questionnaires arriving weekly and penetration tests to coordinate. A principal belongs where security architecture is a product question, such as multi-tenant isolation or customer-managed keys.
The first ninety days
Start with visibility: an inventory of internet-facing assets, who holds administrator access and where secrets are stored. Most early wins come from removing exposure that nobody remembered creating.
Next, agree a short list of high-risk areas with engineering leadership and threat-model them in order. A written model for the login and payment flows is more useful than a long policy document nobody reads.
FAQ
Questions to resolve before the build.
01Will a cybersecurity engineer run penetration tests for us?
They can test specific features and verify fixes, and most have offensive testing experience. For an independent test that auditors or customers will rely on, we still suggest an external firm, with your engineer scoping it and handling the findings.
02Can they help us prepare for ISO 27001 or SOC 2?
Yes, on the technical side: access reviews, logging, change control and evidence that controls run as described. Policies and the audit relationship usually need your leadership involved as well, and the engineer will say where that line falls.
03Do they only review, or do they write code too?
They write code. Fixing an access control check, adding a scanner to CI or tightening an IAM policy in Terraform is part of the job, and pairing with developers on fixes spreads the knowledge.
Works alongside
Roles a cybersecurity engineer works best alongside.
01Pair with
DevOps engineers
To put agreed controls into infrastructure code, CI pipelines and secret stores so they apply by default.
Open register02Pair with
Cloud engineers
When account structure, networking and identity need reworking before tighter security policies can apply.
Open register03Pair with
QA engineers
To turn security findings into regression tests that stop the same flaw returning in a later release.
Open registerProduct delivery
Need the whole product built instead?
Primary sources
References behind this page
Dated official documentation, standards, and research that support the factual claims on this page.
- 01OWASP Application Security Verification Standard
A published catalogue of security requirements for web applications.
- 02NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The US standards body’s framework for organising and improving security risk management.
How to read this page
Scope, cost and timeline figures are planning guidance until confirmed in a written proposal. Diagrams and screens are illustrations, not client deliverables, and source-code rights and handover follow the signed agreement. See the delivery process and the full disclaimer.
Next decision
Turn the brief into an accepted product scope.
Define outcomes, constraints, evidence, rights and handover before delivery begins.
Commercial rights, repositories, environments, documentation, acceptance and handover remain contract-defined.