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ENGINEERING & ARCHITECTURE
Security engineer recruitment
Security engineering is where the shortage bites hardest. Building and automating controls at cloud scale needs software ability alongside security knowledge, and the people with both are in demand everywhere.
What we place
- CLOUD SECURITY
- AWS and Azure security engineering, posture management, container and Kubernetes security, infrastructure-as-code guardrails. Our most requested engineering brief by a wide margin.
- APPLICATION SECURITY
- Secure development support, SAST and DAST pipelines, threat modelling, working inside product teams rather than beside them.
- IDENTITY & ACCESS
- IAM and privileged access engineering, single sign-on, conditional access, joiner-mover-leaver automation.
- NETWORK & INFRASTRUCTURE
- Firewall and segmentation engineering, zero-trust network access, secure remote access at scale.
- DETECTION ENGINEERING
- Building and tuning detection content. Sits between engineering and security operations, and is scarce in both.
- SECURITY ARCHITECTURE
- Design, standards and technical influence across programmes. A different search from engineering, deliberately.
- OT & ICS SECURITY
- Industrial control system and operational technology security for mining, energy and telecoms. A small, slow pool.
How we screen engineers
We test whether a candidate can actually build. Configuring a vendor console is not engineering, and a surprising number of CVs describe the former as the latter. We ask what they have automated, what they wrote it in, what broke, and how they knew it was working.
The second thing we probe is whether they can work with engineers who do not report to them. Security engineering is largely persuasion — getting a platform team to adopt a guardrail, getting developers to fix findings. Candidates who describe other teams as obstacles rarely succeed, however strong the technical answers.
The market, honestly
Cloud security engineers with genuine depth are the scarcest people we look for, in both South Africa and the UK. They are also the most likely to hold a remote offer from an overseas employer paying in dollars, euros or pounds. South African employers hiring at this level are competing internationally whether they intend to or not.
Where a brief is not fillable as written, we would rather restructure it with you at the outset — split the role, adjust the seniority, or open it to remote — than run a search that quietly fails.
Where we recruit
Cape Town, Johannesburg and nationally across South Africa, plus London and the United Kingdom.
Common questions
What separates a security engineer from a security analyst?
Engineers build and operate controls; analysts assess and monitor them. If the role involves writing infrastructure-as-code, running a security platform or automating a control, it is an engineering role — and the candidate pool is different.
Do you place cloud security engineers?
Yes, and it is our most requested engineering brief. AWS and Azure depth, Kubernetes and container security, and infrastructure-as-code security are the skills clients ask for most and find hardest to hire.
Can you find engineers who can code?
Yes, and we test for it rather than take it on trust. Python and Go are the usual expectations. A security engineer who cannot automate is a manual control with a salary attached.
Do you cover OT and industrial control system security?
We do, mostly for mining, energy and telecoms clients in Gauteng. It is a small pool — we are upfront that these searches take longer than an equivalent IT security role.
Are security architects a separate search?
Yes. Architecture is a design and influence role rather than a build role, and the strongest engineers are not automatically strong architects. We treat them as different briefs.
Related disciplines
Talk to us about your search
A short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether we can help.