Director, AI Cybersecurity Specialist

Vista Equity Partners Management•Remote,

1d•$200,000 - $280,000

About The Position

Vista Equity Partners is seeking an AI Cybersecurity Specialist to join the Vista Cybersecurity Group and bring AI-native thinking to cybersecurity across its portfolio companies. The role works 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 establish agentic security operations and incident response. It turns effective approaches into reusable patterns, tooling, and standards that can scale across the portfolio. This is a new capability for Vista, and the scope will grow and shift as it scales. Success is measured through efficiency gains, dollars saved, and measurable improvements in cyber posture. The position requires deep security expertise, practical AI engineering capability, and the credibility to partner with CISOs, CTOs, executives, and technical practitioners. The ideal candidate is a builder who ships working AI-native tooling, an operator who has run AI-enabled security capabilities in production and demonstrated their financial and operational impact, and a strategic advisor who can rethink problems and communicate effectively with both executives and staff. The role leads AI SDLC security initiatives; advises on portfolio AI initiatives; designs agentic SOC and incident response capabilities; modernizes AI-supported vulnerability management; and develops a shared, documented library of skills, agents, prompts, and runbooks. It also supports secure AI governance, threat and risk modeling, frontier-model use cases, hands-on portfolio engagements from assessment through production handoff, outcome measurement, vendor and platform evaluation, AI-related cyber diligence for M&A as needed, and practical guidance on the evolving AI threat landscape.

Requirements

10+ years of general cybersecurity experience.
Ability to explain AI transformation work end to end, including what was built, what went wrong, what changed, and what it saved.
Track record of building AI-native capabilities that improved operational efficiency and demonstrated bottom-line impact, such as reduced cost, lower tool spend, or less manual effort, with the ability to explain how impact was measured.
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, and understanding where they work, where they fail, and how to control 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 continue 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.
Strategic thinking and ability to reframe problems, prioritize across multiple companies, and connect AI opportunities to business value, risk reduction, and dollars saved.
Ability to communicate credibly with executives and staff and build trust quickly with CISOs, CTOs, and practitioners on their teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience in private equity, portfolio operations, consulting, or multi-company environments.

Responsibilities

Lead AI SDLC security work by defining and implementing controls for AI-assisted and agentic software development, including agent identity and permissions, guardrails, evaluation, auditability, and human-in-the-loop decision-making.
Advise the Vista Cybersecurity Group on AI cybersecurity initiatives by reviewing portfolio company AI rollouts, architectures, and vendor proposals and providing 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 by building and deploying tooling for automated triage, prioritization, exploitability analysis, and remediation support to reduce mean time to remediate and analyst toil.
Build and maintain a shared library of skills, agents, prompts, and runbooks that portfolio companies can adopt, with documentation, versioning, and training.
Help portfolio companies build and execute practical, secure AI governance functions, including policies, ownership, approval and review processes, and enforceable controls.
Build risk and threat models for AI initiatives covering agents, models, data flows, and integrations, and turn them into prioritized controls and clear go/no-go guidance.
Identify and deliver frontier-model use cases that improve portfolio company security, such as code and configuration review, threat hunting, detection engineering, alert triage, security questionnaire and evidence analysis, and automated remediation; keep these use cases current as model capabilities advance.
Work with the broader Product & Technology team and portfolio company security and engineering teams to deliver AI-driven security initiatives from assessment and proof of concept through implementation, scale, and handoff, and operate solutions in production long enough to validate them.
Quantify and report engagement outcomes, including efficiency gains, cost savings, and improvements in cyber posture.
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.