There are not enough senior security engineers to go around, and there won't be for years. Every organisation is fishing in the same small pond for the same rare profile, then wondering why roles stay open for six months.
Treating that as a recruiting problem leads to a bidding war you can't win. Treating it as a design problem leads somewhere better. Here's the shift.
Stop hiring for the mythical full-stack defender
The job description that asks for a cloud architect, a threat hunter, a compliance expert and an incident responder in one person is a description of four jobs. It filters out excellent specialists and attracts generalists who are thin everywhere.
Break the role into the capabilities you actually need this year. You'll find the market has plenty of strong people — just not all wearing the same hat.
Build teams, not heroes
Security that rests on one indispensable person is a single point of failure with a pulse. When they burn out or leave, your posture leaves with them.
Design for a team where knowledge is shared and coverage is deliberate: someone owns cloud, someone owns detection, someone owns governance, and they cross-train. It's more resilient, easier to hire for, and far less likely to collapse on a bad week.
Hire for trajectory, not just pedigree
The best security engineers you'll ever employ are often the ones you help become senior. A strong mid-level engineer with the right instincts, given real ownership and mentorship, outperforms a big-name hire who's checked out. Pipeline is a strategy, not a consolation prize.
Use flexible capacity for the spikes
Security work is spiky — an audit, an incident, a migration, a compliance deadline. Staffing your permanent team for peak load is expensive and demoralising in the quiet stretches. Keep a core team for continuity and bring in vetted specialists for the surges. You get depth when you need it without carrying it when you don't.
Make the work worth staying for
Security professionals leave roles where they're treated as a blocker and stay in roles where they're treated as builders. Give them a seat early in decisions, modern tooling and the mandate to actually fix things. Culture is a retention tool that costs less than a counter-offer.
You cannot out-hire a structural shortage. But you can design roles, teams and partnerships that don't depend on finding people who barely exist — and end up more secure for it.
If you're carrying open security roles, let's build a team that doesn't rest on one hard-to-find hire.