Cybersecurity Hiring Pulse - August 2026: 1,029 Open Roles, AWS Overtakes Python, AI Security Goes Mainstream

This is the August 2026 Cybersecurity Hiring Pulse - a monthly snapshot measured from live postings we track hourly across 246 security companies, not from surveys. As of end-July: 1,029 open security roles on the board, up from 901 a month ago, with 88 posted in the last seven days. Part of that growth is real demand and part is coverage - we added three companies in July, including Cellebrite's large Israeli board - so read the mix below, not just the headline. Every number is frozen at publication and free to quote with attribution.

Who is hiring hardest

The security companies that posted the most new roles in the past 30 days (counted from real ATS posting dates - not reposts, and excluding sources that do not publish genuine dates):

• Zscaler - 179 new roles
• SentinelOne - 139 new roles
• Okta - 136 new roles
• Cloudflare - 122 new roles
• Netskope - 87 new roles

The same five names as July, reshuffled - SentinelOne jumped from fourth to second. The live version of this ranking, refreshed hourly, is at top cybersecurity employers →.

Where the demand is

• Security Engineering - 181 open roles (162 in July)
• AppSec - 121 (102)
• Threat Intelligence - 117 (117)
• Detection Engineering - 110 (100)
• Cloud Security - 92 (73)
• GRC - 82 (73)
• AI Security - 72

AppSec overtook Threat Intelligence for the number-two seat, and AI Security now out-ranks identity and offensive work as a demand category - the composition shift toward engineering-heavy and AI-adjacent security roles keeps compounding.

Where the jobs are

• United States - 308 (295 in July)
• Israel - 80 (54)
• United Kingdom - 57 (46)
• India - 37 (31)
• Canada - 25 (25)

Israel's jump is partly our July coverage additions (Cellebrite among them) and partly genuine hiring at the Israeli security vendors - treat the trend, not the exact delta, as the signal. Pay data for 21 countries lives on our salary leaderboards →.

The skills the market is asking for

From the job descriptions themselves: AWS (306 roles), Python (294), GCP (233), Incident Response (231), Go (219), and Azure (216). AWS overtook Python at the top this month - the first time a cloud has out-demanded the language since we started tracking. The reading stays the same: security engineering is cloud-native software engineering with a defender's job description. Browse roles by skill at /skills →.

What pays (and who says so)

Only 14% of security postings publish a salary. A few of this month's roles that did:

• Cloudflare - Vice President, Internal Audit: $300,000 - $375,000
• Vanta - Staff Software Engineer, GRC: $260,000 - $306,000 (remote US)
• Drata - Field CISO: $210,000 - $350,000 (remote US)
• Semgrep - Senior/Staff Security Researcher: $190,000 - $319,000 (remote US)
• Horizon3.ai - Staff Defensive Security Software Engineer: $240,000 - $270,000 (remote US)

Four of those five are fully remote - disclosed pay and remote work keep traveling together. Check your own number against the market band for your role and country with Am I Underpaid? →

Remote, and the honest entry-level number

29% of the security roles we track are remote - the full breakdown by specialization, country, and region (including the new Europe, APAC, and Latin America cuts) is in our remote cybersecurity jobs guide →. And the number most boards will not show you: of 1,029 live security roles, only 13 are explicitly entry-level or internships - down from 17 last month. The way in remains the adjacent doorway, not the job title - the full strategy is in how to get into cybersecurity →.

The takeaway

August's picture is a market quietly expanding while it re-sorts: more engineering, more AppSec and cloud, AI security now a first-class category, and a stubborn scarcity of true entry-level seats. If you are hiring or searching, the edge is the same: work from live data, not last year's narrative.

A new Pulse ships every month - the July edition is here, and the deeper quarterly analysis lives in the State of Cybersecurity Hiring report →. All figures are free to quote with attribution to InfoSec Job Board.