Building Cloud and Cyber Security Teams: Which Roles Should You Hire First?

Cloud and cyber security hiring are closely connected, but they are not interchangeable disciplines. A business may have strong cloud engineers and still need dedicated security expertise. Another may have a security strategy but lack the platform skills to implement it consistently.

The correct hiring sequence depends on the existing systems, risks and delivery plan. Here is a practical way to decide where to start.

Understand the existing environment

Begin with an honest picture of the technology estate. Is the organisation operating legacy infrastructure, several cloud providers, a new digital product or a mix of environments? Which systems are business-critical? Who manages deployments, identity, access, monitoring and incident response today?

Map the gaps to real work. A cloud migration needs different specialists from a company strengthening threat detection or improving regulatory controls.

Core cloud roles to consider

Cloud engineers and architects design and maintain cloud environments, including networks, access, infrastructure and resilience. Depending on seniority, they may implement services or define architecture across several delivery teams.

DevOps and platform engineers improve the systems developers use to build, test and deploy software. A strong platform function can reduce repetitive work and make reliable delivery easier.

Site reliability engineers focus on availability, observability, incident handling and engineering practices that make services dependable. Not every business needs a separate SRE team, but every production system needs ownership of reliability.

Core cyber security roles to consider

Security engineers implement controls, security tooling and technical improvements across applications and infrastructure.

Cloud security specialists concentrate on cloud architecture, access, configuration and monitoring. The role often requires collaboration with platform and engineering teams.

Security operations professionals investigate alerts and incidents, improve detection and coordinate response processes.

Security leaders translate business risk into priorities, budget decisions, policies and accountability.

There can be overlap, but combining all these functions into one vacancy creates an unrealistic job description.

A practical hiring sequence

For a growing engineering organisation, the first priority may be experienced platform ownership and embedded security practices. For a regulated business, governance and specialist security leadership may be needed earlier. For a company with repeated incidents, reliability and security operations could be urgent.

Document the largest risks, the work that must be delivered in the next two quarters and the tasks current staff cannot cover. Recruit around those priorities instead of copying another company’s team chart.

Interview for evidence

Ask cloud candidates how they approached an outage, migration or security incident, and what they changed afterward. Ask cyber candidates how they balanced security objectives with usability and operational constraints.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies networks and cyber security among the areas expected to grow in importance. That broader trend is useful context, but a good individual hire is still defined by evidence of delivery in the employer’s environment.

Permanent or project-based help?

An organisation may need permanent cloud leadership and a contract project team for a specific migration. Equally, a short security assessment should have a clear plan for transferring knowledge to the staff who will own the resulting controls.

DX3 recruits across cloud, DevOps, infrastructure, cyber security and technology leadership, with permanent and contract staffing models available for discussion.

Further reading: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025.

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