For a misconfiguration that gets caught before it becomes a breach
Hire Cloud Security Engineers
Most cloud breaches trace back to a misconfiguration or an over-permissioned role that sat unnoticed for months, not a sophisticated attack. These engineers are tested on finding exactly that kind of gap before it becomes an incident, then placed to keep your cloud footprint genuinely defensible.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a cloud security engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The cloud security bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about frameworks by name. This one asks whether an actual breach would be caught in time.
What we listen forWhether they investigate before acting, not just revoke on sight.
An access review finds a developer role with permissions to delete production databases, unused for eight months. Walk us through your response.
- What strong sounds like
- Proposes confirming the role is genuinely unused before revoking it, and investigates why it was granted in the first place.
- What gives us pause
- Revokes the permission immediately without investigating why it was granted or confirming nothing currently depends on it.
AWS/Azure/GCP Security · IAM · Encryption
CSPM Tools · GuardDuty · Security Center
SOC2 · HIPAA · PCI-DSS
Vault · KMS · SIEM
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,900–3,600per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,900–4,900per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$5,200–6,500per month
Cloud security engineer
4 yrs · US East overlap
Found a public storage bucket and confirmed zero external access before closing the gap
- IAM
- CSPM
- Encryption
Senior cloud security engineer
8 yrs · UK + EU hours
Mapped a company's real cloud controls to SOC2 requirements, finding gaps before the auditor did
- Compliance
- GuardDuty
- KMS
- SIEM
Lead security architect
11 yrs · EU + US split
Contained a compromised credential within minutes before it could enumerate production resources
- Incident Response
- Architecture
- Vault
- IAM
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
What matters here is your actual attack surface, not a framework name-check. Each step produces something concrete, and walking away at any point costs you nothing.
Define the security problem
We map where your cloud footprint's access control or detection is actually weak. The brief names that gap, not a list of frameworks to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your footprint
Candidates are screened against your actual cloud provider, your compliance obligations and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your risk beat thirty who list certifications.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Bring your own engineers to the IAM-audit and incident-response exercises. Judgement under real pressure is visible here, not a rehearsed framework recital.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded fix to a real gap. Continuity cover means a departure is absorbed on our side before your risk posture feels it.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who caught it before the auditor, or the attacker, did.
Cloud security proof is a gap closed before it was exploited, not a clean scan report alone. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A public bucket found and fixed before a single record was accessed.
Koru Health's routine cloud scan flagged a storage bucket that had been misconfigured for public read access for two weeks. An embedded cloud security engineer confirmed no external access had occurred and closed the gap the same day.
- Records accessed externally
- Zero, confirmed
- Time to close the gap
- Same day
He found an IAM role with delete permissions on production that nobody could explain, sitting unused for months.
Sample · pending client approval
She mapped our actual controls to SOC2 requirements and found three gaps our auditor would have caught first.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a security pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer auditing and hardening existing infrastructure. Some need a pod that owns security posture end to end. If the real requirement is security delivered end to end, not a role filled, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single cloud security specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and usually the first step.
- Delivery pods
A security pod
A pod with its own lead that owns your cloud security posture end to end, incident response included. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Data & Cloud
The practice, not the person
If the real requirement is security posture delivered end to end, not a role filled, data and cloud engineering carries that accountability instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a cloud security hire is signed.
01What does a cloud security engineer actually do day to day?
Audits IAM policies for real least-privilege, hunts for misconfigurations before they are exploited, and keeps compliance controls honest rather than merely documented. The unglamorous majority of the work is catching the gap nobody was looking for.
02Do you hire for a specific compliance framework?
Matched to your actual obligations. Security judgement about access control and detection transfers across SOC2, HIPAA and PCI, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with whichever applies to you.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the IAM-audit exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a cloud security engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a continuously evaluated bench. Onboarding speed after that depends mostly on how quickly your side can grant account access.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads hold the risk standards and set direction. We take on what sits behind the engineer instead: continuity, payroll, replacement risk and the handoff when something changes.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Tell us early and the swap won't cost you anything. The next candidate is walked through precisely what went wrong, which keeps a second miss rare.
07Do your cloud security engineers use AI tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts policy scaffolding and audit checklists quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every access decision, incident response and merge that reaches your environment.
08How does pricing work for a hired cloud security engineer?
The bands above are the honest starting point; the exact per-engineer figure comes with the shortlist. No placement fee, monthly billing, notice period at exit.