Hiring a Cloud Security Engineer?
Your team is hiring; I run the technical round for you. One 60-minute live interview per candidate, with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours.
About the role — Secures the estate without stopping delivery. The balance is the interview.
What you get
A 60-minute live interview with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours. No retainer; fee quoted on the scoping call.
01 — Why this role is hard to assess
Security candidates can list controls indefinitely. The signal is whether they have ever had to say no to a shipping team and make it stick — or, harder, say yes with a compensating control.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- Designing least-privilege IAM for a team that keeps asking for admin
- A real finding they triaged as low severity, and why
- Secret rotation that does not cause an outage
- Where they would put a control that developers will try to route around
03 — A scenario from the round
An S3 bucket with customer data has been publicly readable for an unknown period. Walk me through the first hour, in order, and tell me who you call.
Scenarios rotate between candidates so the round stays fair, and none of the published examples are used verbatim.
What I listen for
Failure modes specific to this role
- Treats every finding as critical
- Has never had a security control rolled back
- Confuses compliance with security
- No view on detection versus prevention trade-offs
Scored on
- Threat reasoning
- IAM depth
- Incident response
- Pragmatism
- Stakeholder handling
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a Cloud Security Engineer this quarter?
Fifteen minutes to agree the rubric, then I run the round. One candidate or twenty — there is no retainer and no minimum.