Director, AI Cybersecurity Specialist

Position Summary

Vista Equity Partners is seeking an AI Cybersecurity Specialist to join the Vista Cybersecurity Group and bring AI-native thinking to cybersecurity across our portfolio companies.

You will work hands-on with portfolio company security and engineering teams, alongside the broader Product & Technology team, to apply AI and agentic technologies to secure the software development lifecycle, modernize vulnerability management, and set up agentic security operations and incident response. You will turn what works at one portfolio company into reusable patterns, tooling, and standards that scale across the portfolio. This is a new capability for Vista, and the scope of the role will grow and shift as it scales.

We measure success in results: efficiency gains, dollars saved, and a measurably stronger cyber posture. The role requires deep security expertise, real AI engineering capability, and the credibility to partner with CISOs, CTOs, and executive teams.The Ideal Candidate -----------------------

A builder, an operator, and a strategic advisor.* Builder: ships working AI-native tooling, agents, and skills rather than slide decks about them. * Operator: has run AI-enabled security capabilities in production and can show the efficiency gain on the bottom line: lower cost, less manual effort, faster cycle times. * Strategic advisor: thinks outside the box, reframes problems instead of copying existing playbooks, and can talk shop with executives and staff alike.

What Success Looks Like

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• Portfolio companies adopt Vista-built AI security skills and tooling, not just advice.
• AI SDLC, vulnerability management, and agentic SOC/IR each have a repeatable playbook that new portfolio companies can pick up.
• Vista leadership and portfolio CISOs treat this person as the first call on AI cybersecurity questions.

Responsibilities: * Lead Vista's AI SDLC security work: define and implement controls for AI-assisted and agentic software development, including identity and permissions for agents, guardrails, evaluation, auditability, and human-in-the-loop decision making. * Serve as the Vista Cybersecurity Group's advisor on AI cybersecurity initiatives: review portfolio company AI rollouts, architectures, and vendor proposals, and give clear, practical recommendations. * Design and implement agentic SOC and incident response capabilities, including automated investigation, enrichment, response playbooks, and escalation paths with appropriate human oversight. * Modernize vulnerability management with AI: build and deploy tooling for automated triage, prioritization, exploitability analysis, and remediation support that reduces mean time to remediate and analyst toil. * Build and maintain a shared library of skills, agents, prompts, and runbooks that portfolio companies can adopt directly, with documentation, versioning, and training so they get used. * Help portfolio companies build and execute a real-world, secure AI governance function, including policies, ownership, approval and review processes, and the controls that make them enforceable in practice. * Build risk and threat models for AI initiatives, covering agents, models, data flows, and integrations, and turn them into prioritized controls and clear go or no-go guidance for portfolio company leaders. * Identify and deliver frontier model use cases that secure portfolio companies and strengthen their security posture, such as code and configuration review, threat hunting, detection engineering, alert triage, security questionnaire and evidence analysis, and automated remediation, and keep them current as model capabilities advance. * Join portfolio company engagements with the broader Product & Technology team and work hands-on with their security and engineering teams to deliver AI-driven security initiatives, from assessment and proof of concept through implementation, scale, and handoff, and run what we build in production long enough to prove it works. * Quantify and report outcomes for every engagement, including efficiency gains, cost savings, and improvements in cyber posture, so the value shows up in numbers leadership recognizes. * Evaluate AI security platforms, models, and vendors while maintaining vendor independence, and support AI-related cyber diligence on M&A transactions as needed. * Track the evolving AI threat landscape, including frontier model capabilities, and translate it into practical guidance for the portfolio.

Qualifications: * 10+ years of general cybersecurity experience. * AI transformation stories you can walk through end to end: what you built, what went wrong, what changed, and what it saved. * A track record of building AI-native capabilities that drove operational efficiency and showed up on the bottom line, such as reduced cost, lower tool spend, or less manual effort, and the ability to explain exactly how you measured it. * 2+ years of hands-on, production use of frontier AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, and a demonstrated record of building with them. * Demonstrated experience applying frontier and advanced models to real security problems, such as vulnerability analysis, detection engineering, investigation, or remediation, with a clear view of where they work, where they fail, and how to control the risk. * Experience building agentic systems for security use cases, including orchestration, tool use, memory, evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design. * Experience packaging work as reusable skills, agents, plugins, or runbooks that other teams adopt and keep using. * Working knowledge of AI-specific security risks and frameworks, including prompt injection, agent identity and permissions, model supply chain, and secure agentic SDLC practices. * Strong coding ability in Python or a comparable language, plus familiarity with cloud environments, CI/CD, and modern security tooling. * Outside-the-box strategic thinking: ability to reframe problems, prioritize across many companies, and tie AI opportunities to business value, risk reduction, and dollars saved. * Ability to talk shop credibly with executives and staff alike, and to build trust quickly with CISOs, CTOs, and the practitioners on their teams. * Experience in private equity, portfolio operations, consulting, or multi-company environments is preferred.

The annualized base pay range for this role is expected to be between $200,000 - $280,000. Actual base pay could vary based on factors including but not limited to experience, subject matter expertise, geographic location where work will be performed and the applicant’s skill set. The base pay is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other components may include an annual cash bonus and a comprehensive benefits package.

Company Overview

Vista is a preeminent technology investor, specializing in enterprise AI and software, with over $100 billion in AUM. For over 25 years and across every technology cycle, Vista has been pioneering new approaches to software investing, delivering consistent and compelling results at scale. Today, we're applying that expertise to help harness the transformative potential of AI to redefine how work gets done. Further information is available at vistaequitypartners.com. Follow Vista on LinkedIn, @Vista Equity Partners, and on YouTube.