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 A.I. arms race.”
As A.I. 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 percent from a year earlier, according to Glassdoor, a job search platform.
Hiring of security experts has surged as tech workers increasingly use A.I. to generate code, sometimes introducing bugs and vulnerabilities in the process. And leading A.I. 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 A.I. can also help create some jobs, even amid dire warnings that the technology could replace vast parts of the work force.
“We’re going to need people to deal with the bug-pocalypse,” said Lea Kissner, the chief information security officer at LinkedIn. “I don’t think we’re really going to understand how to do A.I. security in a sustainable, long-term way for at least several years.”
Dr. 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 A.I. revolution, and an understanding of how complex corporate infrastructure works.
“The job market for security people is getting hotter and hotter,” Dr. Kissner added.
Cybersecurity is not the only area where A.I. 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 A.I. boom and to use the technology to assess and enhance their portfolios. The A.I. industry itself is hiring — the fastest-growing job title for recent college graduates is A.I. engineer, according to LinkedIn.
“We need more software engineers than ever,” Nick Fox, the 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 A.I. 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. On Wednesday, Meta laid off 10 percent of its staff, or about 8,000 people, as it reallocated spending to A.I. 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.
Cybersecurity hiring has particularly picked up speed as A.I. models have made rapid advances.
Last month, the A.I. start-up Anthropic announced that it had built a new model, Mythos, that was exceptional at finding and exploiting flaws in the software that supports the world’s power grids, financial institutions and major companies. The announcement set off a global scramble to prepare for how attackers might eventually use the technology. A week later, OpenAI unveiled similar technology, GPT‑5.4‑Cyber.
Both companies released the technology to a limited group of partners for testing.
For businesses, seeking highly technical security executives “has gotten more and more common” since Anthropic began previewing Mythos, said Michael Piacente, a managing partner at Hitch Partners, an executive search firm that specializes in security. His firm has been flooded by these requests.
“The increase since the fall of last year has been five-, maybe sevenfold,” he said. “We’ve turned down quite a number of searches as a result.”
Some cybersecurity experts are brushing up on A.I. 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 A.I. tools to write code, a practice called vibecoding. He used A.I. to make music, web apps and software, and added those projects to his portfolio. Demonstrating his A.I. chops helped him find a new job last month building out an A.I. start-up’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 percent.”
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 A.I. researchers, who can net pay packages of $250 million. Mr. Cowan said a $7 million or $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, Dr. Kissner said, intensifying the hiring competition.
“A.I. has just made us busier,” Dr. Kissner said. “This is true for every single security person I know.”
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
The post One Job That Is Growing in the A.I. Era? Cybersecurity Experts. appeared first on New York Times.
