Hire a Security Engineer
Usually forced by a customer, usually needed a quarter earlier.
The first security hire is a different animal to the fifth
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
Most startups hire their first security engineer because a customer asked. A questionnaire arrives, or a deal stalls on SOC 2, and suddenly the thing nobody owned needs an owner this quarter.
That means the role is not what a large company means by it. There is no team to join, no existing programme, no detection stack. The hire has to set the policy, build the controls, pass the audit, and do it without becoming the department of no in a company that ships daily.
Which excludes most of the market. Security engineers at large companies are specialists inside a machine somebody else built. The ones who can build the machine from nothing are rare, and almost never on a job board.
How the agent runs a security engineer search
It reads for building, not auditing
Tooling they wrote, CVEs they filed, write-ups on a control they designed. Evidence that they build defences rather than produce findings.
It looks in the research community
Conference talks, disclosure write-ups, open-source security tooling. The strongest candidates are visible there and invisible on job boards.
Outreach that names the real scope
The message says it is a first hire, what you are compliant with today, and which deal is waiting. Candidates who want a big team self-select out, which saves everyone a month.
Screening on the pragmatic half
Your questions go out early: the control they chose not to implement and why, and how they got engineers to adopt something they did not want.
Questions.
Answered.
If deals are stalling on questionnaires and audits, a compliance-led hire can unblock faster. If the risk is in the product, hire the engineer. Many first hires have to do both, which the agent screens for.
Having been through an audit helps enormously, but having run one at a large company with a dedicated team is less relevant than having done it lean.
Public evidence first: disclosures, tooling, talks. Then your screening questions, which tend to separate people who have shipped controls from people who have written policies.
Tell us which risk keeps you up and the agent weights the search accordingly. A first hire usually has to cover both, so we read for range.
Hire an Infrastructure Engineer
The person who makes the platform boring, on purpose.
Hire a DevOps Engineer
The engineer who owns the pipes so everyone else can ship.
AI recruiting for fintech startups
Real money, real regulators, and no tolerance for a bug that rounds wrong.
Find your first security engineer.
Tell us which deal is waiting and the agent will find people who have unblocked one before.