Staff+ engineers play a critical role in designing, scaling and influencing the security posture of an organization. Their key areas of expertise include developing security strategy and governance, incident response leadership, automation, compliance/risk management and cross-org collaboration to shape security culture. Together, these capabilities are essential to enhance application security and the effectiveness of their organizations.
However, in our experience, we have seen that many staff+ security engineers face scaling challenges. Instead of leveraging their expertise to drive broad, cross-stack impact, they tend to concentrate on specific incidents or focus areas, which limits their ability to extend their influence and strategic reach. Such a scaling problem has consequences on the organization and its personal goals.
Also, leadership considers staff+ engineers as trusted advisors, helping them make high-judgment decisions. However, when engineers tend to get stuck on specific tactical incidents or solutions, leaders are left without their strategic insights. Conversely, staff+ engineers who are too busy in the weeds, miss to proactively look out for their “leaders’ problems.” Leaders perceive these engineers as too busy and hesitate to increase their scope and loop them in broader discussions, which ultimately leads to missed opportunities for the staff+ security engineers.
There are plenty of practices that staff+ engineers can adopt to enable them to scale and force-multiply their impact across their organization. Remember, you, as a staff+ security engineer, are ultimately an enabler, not a bottleneck!
Practical ideas to help you scale
One of the most common ideas in people management, “scaling through others,” is well-applicable to staff+ security engineers. It basically means amplifying your impact not by doing more work yourself, but by enabling many others to work more effectively and productively with your influence. In other words, you’ll not do best by being a hero, but by creating “mini you’s” across the organization. When applied with discipline, scaling through others’ work well in practical settings. Here are some ideas you can consider:
Create mechanisms that allow you to scale
Mechanisms enforce or reinforce a behavior automatically. Also, they are not one-size-fits-all, but with some trial and error, we have observed that strong mechanisms consistently support desired behavior. For example, a policy-as-code framework integrated into CI/CD pipelines automatically enforces security and compliance policies, reducing manual checks and human error. While this is an example of a technical mechanism (which we will talk more about in the next section), mechanisms can also be people-oriented, say, mentorship programs or mentorship trees.
Determine where to dive deeper and where to delegate
Being an expert in the area, staff+ engineers can pretty much dive in anywhere from critical incidents to strategic initiatives. They may be drawn in by urgent team needs, their own curiosity or something else. But it is crucial for them to carefully evaluate where to make and avoid costly commitments. Asking a set of targeted questions can provide valuable insight: “What is the potential impact on security posture or risk to the organization?”; “Is there an established process or tooling (‘paved path’) to address this?”; and “Is this a one-time incident or a recurring security challenge that requires a scalable, strategic solution?” Often, true learning comes from failure. If the risk is manageable, allow others to step up and learn from their own failures.
Create a trusted group
To scale through others, you will need a group to rely on. Some organizations solve this problem via job levels, where staff+ engineer roles are defined to scale through other roles like senior security engineers. In other cases, you might need to define your selection criteria and training path. Just creating this group is not enough; an action plan and thorough execution are critical. In practice, such working groups run brown-bag sessions, create mentorship and recognition programs and discuss/review solutions that help lift the organization’s security KPIs. Additionally, mentorship sessions and office hours from staff+ engineers help build working relationships that last.
Employ non-security engineers to the cause
Involving application engineers in the security cause is an often-overlooked “hack” that works well in industrial settings. This “shift-left” approach involves embedding security practices directly into the software development pipeline, enabling development teams to take ownership of security controls and assessments early in the lifecycle. Programs such as security champions or security reviewers empower application engineers to integrate standard security and compliance practices as part of their regular workflows, reducing bottlenecks and fostering a security-first mindset. Staff+ security engineers should look for opportunities to drive the creation of these programs, enable cross-functional collaboration and scale through application engineers to increase their impact.
Eliminate anti-patterns
Lastly, we would recommend staff+ security engineers to inspect and eliminate anti-patterns in their (and peer) organizations. These anti-patterns work against scaling and make them and their organizations bottlenecks, instead of enablers. One example we have commonly seen is when security engineers act as permanent gatekeepers. This “block by default” approach is expensive and needs significant time investment for staff+ engineers and slows down business. Similarly, policies without exceptions are a time drain for both security and application teams. We highly recommend staff+ security engineers to proactively identify such patterns and replace them with mechanisms.
Technical mechanisms to consider
To effectively scale their impact, staff+ security engineers should champion a comprehensive technical approach that integrates secure practices into every layer of the organization, technology and culture. This ultimately acts as a mechanism or guardrails for their organizations, ensuring their guidance is automatically enforced and allowing them time for strategic influence. Key elements include:
- Incorporate focused action areas in the organization-wide security strategy: While staff+ security engineers are responsible for developing a clear, actionable security strategy, we recommend they encompass policy-as-code enforcement, risk gates and continuous monitoring. Leverage the trusted group to assign ownership by appointing area leaders who drive accountability and progress within their domains. Review their findings and tune the strategy periodically. This helps staff+ engineers avoid the need to inspect every aspect of a large organization’s security strategy.
- Adopt reference architectures and secure-by-default reusable modules: We recommend staff+ security engineers to build and provide trusted, opinionated blueprints, golden images, baseline policies and reusable components that make secure design the path of least resistance for development teams. Building such “paved paths” enables seamless and secure development for teams without developer whiplash. Finally, using trusted groups to drive adoption, they can effectively influence teams’ technical direction.
- Shift-left security practices: Briefly discussed before, integrating security early in the development lifecycle is the central theme of modern-day DevSecOps practices. Embedding automated controls, threat modeling and validation tools into pull requests, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) plans enables developers to catch and fix issues before deployment without workflow disruption. Consequently, this allows staff+ engineers (and their organizations) to reduce security bugs that reach production.
- Leverage AI-driven scanning tools and automation cautiously: The rapid development of GenAI has unlocked significant capabilities in security tooling. AI tools are now available that strengthen security practices through adaptive learning, risk prioritization and context-aware detection. Staff+ security engineers should champion the adoption of these tools to enhance vulnerability detection and streamline workflows. Supplementing these tools with expert reviews helps mitigate false positives and assess the impact of security vulnerabilities effectively.
- Guardrails over Gates: We recommend staff+ security engineers to build checks that enforce blocking only on high confidence and high impact security signals, while warning or logging lower risk issues to maintain velocity. Using compensating controls like monitoring, automated remediation and risk scoring to manage risks without blocking progress.
The overall guiding principle we recommend for all staff+ security engineers is to make the secure way the easiest and most intuitive path for all engineers; this helps security to scale sustainably alongside business growth. We believe this guiding principle, along with the above technical framework, enables staff+ security engineers to force-multiply their impact by embedding robust security foundations, fostering a culture of shared ownership and automating enforcement. The result is a resilient, scalable and developer-friendly security posture.
Incident influence
So, how can staff+ security engineers force-multiply their impact during active security incidents? The most critical tool that the engineer has in such a scenario is their mindset: “You’re the stabilizer, not the savior.” Take the role of an orchestrator: If you get too deep into the logs, other areas that need support will suffer. Look to assign tactical work to different individual contributors and focus on leading the incident, coordinating across roles and managing leadership communications.
Next, it is critical to identify inflection points. You will be expected to make high-velocity, high-judgement decisions that decide the course of incident management. Determine thresholds beyond which upper leadership involvement or additional support is essential. Utilize the inflection points to guide you when to move from containment to recovery to retrospective. Once the situation is in control, switch to an influencer role and scale through others, in line with your standard engagement mechanisms.
Act as a bridge between leadership and teams
Lastly, note that you are a link between management/leadership and engineers on the ground. Managers may not fully understand the details of execution or delays in identifying/remediating vulnerabilities in the software. Teams will rely on you to identify and bridge process gaps or represent them to leadership for decision-making. For example, in our case, our team was hesitating to adopt a powerful static analysis tool. While the team identified it as a critical need, it had high licensing costs, leading to multiple back-and-forth discussions. When our principal staff engineer learned about it, she promptly created a one-page document with the pros and cons and aligned leaders on funding it due to the high return-on-investment. She resolved a two-week team debate and analysis in just one afternoon.
Conversely, you are also the leadership’s representative on the ground, shepherding the team along the leadership’s direction. Consider influencing the teams in building and reviewing deep visibility dashboards that accurately capture key security insights. This provides leaders with a strong feedback loop and real-time visibility on the consequences of their decisions.
Final thoughts
The journey of a staff+ security engineer is about transitioning from individual contributions to a force multiplier. This is especially important as AI and automation redefine scale; the leaders who design for empowerment will define the next era of cybersecurity engineering.
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