SAN FRANCISCO – Austin Cowan had expected a quiet year.
The headhunter, who helps Fortune 100 companies find and attract cybersecurity executives, knew that the markets were choppy and that corporate honchos were mulling how artificial intelligence might upend their businesses.
But Heidrick & Struggles, the white glove executive talent firm where Mr Cowan works, has been deluged in recent months with requests to find executives who have experience responding to security breaches and protecting data, along with the technical know-how to review code.
“Roles that typically come along every 12 months, we’re seeing those roles come along every week,” Mr Cowan said. “I think it’s driven by fear and uncertainty in this AI arms race.”
As AI upends jobs – particularly in Silicon Valley – the risks and pitfalls associated with the technology have helped fuel a new wave of hiring for cybersecurity experts.
Demand is so fierce that some search firms have said they are turning away clients, partly because there are too few qualified candidates to go around. Cybersecurity job postings in the first quarter were up 11 per cent from a year earlier, according to Glassdoor, a job search platform.
Hiring of security experts has surged as tech workers increasingly use AI to generate code, sometimes introducing bugs and vulnerabilities in the process. And leading AI labs have warned that their latest technologies, like Anthropic’s Mythos model, could be used to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. That would make it easier to hack into companies’ infrastructure.
The hiring frenzy shows how AI can also help create some jobs, even amid dire warnings that the technology could replace vast parts of the workforce.
“We’re going to need people to deal with the bug-pocalypse,” said Lea Kissner, chief information security officer at LinkedIn. “I don’t think we’re really going to understand how to do AI security in a sustainable, long-term way for at least several years.”
Ms Kissner said they had scoured the market to hire engineers with technical skills, the open-mindedness to navigate the ambiguity and confusion that comes with the AI revolution, and an understanding of how complex corporate infrastructure works.
“The job market for security people is getting hotter and hotter,” Ms Kissner added.
Cybersecurity is not the only area where AI has spurred a hiring boom. It is also creating jobs in private equity and venture capital firms, recruiters said, as investors look to cash in on the AI boom and to use the technology to assess and enhance their portfolios. The AI industry itself is hiring – the fastest-growing job title for recent college graduates is AI engineer, according to LinkedIn.
“We need more software engineers than ever,” Nick Fox, senior vice president of knowledge and information at Google, said on a panel at the company’s marketing conference last week. But engineers’ roles have shifted to managing AI agents, or bots that act as assistants in accomplishing various tasks, he said.
“That’s a change to the work of a software engineer,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean the job of a software engineer goes away.”
Still, those areas of growth are unlikely to offset widespread job cuts in other parts of the tech industry. Last week, Meta laid off 10 per cent of its staff, or about 8,000 people, as it reallocated spending to AI. Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in a recent round of layoffs. Other tech companies, including Stripe, Snap and Block, have also shed thousands of workers.
Some cybersecurity experts are brushing up on AI to make themselves more marketable.
Brian Gaudenti, a security engineer, left his job detecting and investigating cyberthreats at a large tech company in November. Despite more than a decade of experience in the field, he initially struggled to find a new gig.
But at a cybersecurity conference in March, he noticed that other engineers were using AI tools to write code, a practice called vibecoding. He used AI to make music, web apps and software, and added those projects to his portfolio. Demonstrating his AI chops helped him find a new job last month building out an AI startup’s security team.
“People who are not doing that and waiting for their old jobs to reappear, they’re not going to find them again,” he said. “I don’t think there’s going to be a net loss in jobs, but people are going to have to adapt what their next job is going to be, 100 per cent.”
Workers landing interviews for top security jobs have significant bargaining power, recruiters said, and pay packages are spiking – though not as high as for top AI researchers, who can net pay packages of US$250 million (S$320 million). Mr Cowan said a US$7 million or US$8 million package was becoming more common for security executives.
“That would knock someone out of their chair a few years ago,” he said. “There’s this recognition that there’s so few people who have the skill set, so we have to go and get them.”
The recruiting fever is trickling down to midlevel roles, too. Security engineers are asking for higher pay and more interesting work, Ms Kissner said, intensifying the hiring competition.
“AI has just made us busier,” Ms Kissner said. “This is true for every single security person I know.” NYTIMES
