18 companies hiring their first security engineer

By the RoleDawn data team · Published 2026-10-05 · Data updated 2026-10-05

18 companies in our dataset posted their first security role we've seen on their careers board — 18 of them detected in the last 7 days. For anyone selling security tooling, compliance automation or pentest services, this is a short list of accounts that may be building a security program. Signals indicate intent, not proof of budget.

Why the first security hire matters

A first security engineer or CISO triggers spend on SIEM, vulnerability scanning, identity, endpoint and pentest services. The first security person is usually hired after a large customer asks for SOC 2 or ISO 27001, after a funding round, or after an incident. In their first months they often inventory what exists, evaluate vendors and write the first policies — which can make it a good moment for relevant outreach.

Across all 354 companies we see hiring security staff, there are 777 open security roles. The companies below are different: we had not seen a security role on their careers board before. (They may have hired security staff before we started tracking them, or without a public posting.)

What kind of first security hire?

Grouping the job titles of these first hires shows what companies ask their first security person to do:

Where

The list: companies hiring their first security engineer

Signals indicate intent, not proof of budget. How signals are detected · Report a wrong signal

Methodology

We crawl public ATS careers boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Recruitee, Workday) daily and classify each title into one of 41 role families. A first posting we've seen (0 here) is a security role on a board where we had previously recorded postings and never a security role. On a company's first crawl a new function (inferred) is estimated when the board is established (roles older than 60 days) and all of its 1–2 security roles were posted in the last 21 days; we never infer security for security vendors or for boards with 15+ open roles. Full details and measured accuracy: methodology.

Related: all companies hiring security roles · first compliance & GRC hires · security hiring trends