Field CISO

ONWARDS TOGETHER!

Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. Powered by the Illumio AI Security Graph, our breach containment platform identifies and contains threats across hybrid multi-cloud environments – stopping the spread of attacks before they become disasters.

Recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for Microsegmentation, Illumio enables Zero Trust, strengthening cyber resilience for the infrastructure, systems, and organizations that keep the world running.

OUR TEAM'S VISION:

Illumio is the breach containment company. Built on Zero Trust principles, the Illumio platform combines real-time visibility with segmentation and AI-powered detection and response, helping organizations stop the spread of breaches and ransomware across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments before they become disasters. Illumio Segmentation contains attackers by stopping lateral movement across the enterprise, and Illumio Insights delivers AI-driven visibility and detection across hybrid cloud environments.

Illumio was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026, earning the highest scores in current offering and strategy of any vendor evaluated, and is recognized as a Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights for Network Security – Microsegmentation. Global enterprises across financial services, healthcare, energy and utilities, government, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications trust Illumio to reduce cyber risk and build resilience.

OUR VALUES

Our values reflect how we work together in practice - not just what we aspire to. They show up in everyday decisions, how we collaborate across teams, and how we treat each other while building and delivering our work. If these values resonate with you, you’ll likely feel at home here.

• Bring Your Best: We hold ourselves to a standard of excellence for our customers and each other, regardless of circumstance.
• Build Trust: We act with integrity, transparency, and follow-through, earning trust in every interaction.
• Seek Truth: We pursue facts over assumptions, stay curious, and remain open to being wrong.
• Onwards Together: We move forward as one team, supporting each other through challenges and wins alike.
• Leverage Differences: We treat diverse perspectives and backgrounds as a source of strength and better decisions.

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Field CISO, Zero Trust Segmentation is a newly created, specialized role within the Global Solutions Engineering team, chartered to deepen Illumio’s credibility and category leadership within the CISO community. This role is intentionally sourced from the CISO community: we are looking for a security executive - a current or former CISO, Deputy CISO, or senior security leader - who brings a proven balance of business acumen, technical depth, and operational experience running a security program, rather than a traditional pre-sales background. This is a hybrid role by design: half executive advisor and evangelist, half hands-on architect.

As Field CISO, this person is Illumio’s most credible external voice on Zero Trust Segmentation and breach containment - engaging CISOs and CTOs at strategic accounts as a peer, shaping the category narrative with industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, and other leading firms), and representing the company at industry events. This person also personally owns the technical backbone of pre-sales for the category: the Use Case Map, demo environments, POC/POV frameworks, and reference architectures that the rest of the global SE team (AMS, EMEA, APAC) builds on.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategic Field Leadership & Evangelism

• Serve as Illumio’s foremost executive voice on Zero Trust Segmentation and breach containment, in the field and in public - conferences, webinars, analyst briefings, and published content.
• Build and maintain analyst relationships (Gartner, Forrester, and other leading firms) to shape how the category is defined and evaluated in the market.
• Engage CISO- and CTO-level stakeholders directly on the most strategic opportunities, drawing on firsthand operating experience to act as a peer and trusted advisor alongside regional SE leads and AEs.
• Partner with Sales and GTM leadership to shape go-to-market and revenue acceleration strategy.
• Partner with Product Marketing and Product Management to shape positioning, messaging, and roadmap priorities, informed directly by field and firsthand operator signal.

Technical Architecture & Enablement Ownership

• Own and continuously evolve the Use Case Map, Demo Runbook, and reference architectures used across the global SE organization.
• Personally design and build flagship demo environments and POC/POV frameworks, including integration patterns and success-criteria templates.
• Partner directly with product engineering to translate roadmap into sellable, demoable capability, and drive pre-sales enablement to sell-ready status and beyond.
• Maintain deep, current hands-on fluency with the Illumio platform - including segmentation, hybrid cloud detection and response, and broader Zero Trust architecture concepts.

Enterprise Pre-Sales & POC Execution

• Lead or co-lead the most strategic and complex opportunities globally, engaging directly alongside AMS, EMEA, and APAC SE teams.
• Architect and execute high-stakes POCs/POVs, including technical prerequisites, integration scoping, success-criteria definition, and executive readout.
• Act as the final technical and executive escalation point for deals across regions, ensuring a consistent, credible narrative in front of customers.

Team Enablement & Capability Building

• Design and deliver training curriculum and certification paths for the global SE team.
• Build battlecards, FAQs, and RFP response libraries, keeping the team current against an evolving competitive landscape.
• Mentor SE Leads and SEs on segmentation and breach containment concepts, positioning, and objection handling - bringing an operator’s perspective on how real security teams evaluate and adopt these solutions.

Product & Market Feedback Loop

• Serve as a structured, credible voice of the field back to Product Management on roadmap priorities, feature gaps, and competitive intelligence.
• Track and analyze the competitive landscape across microsegmentation, Zero Trust, and cloud detection and response, including new entrants and adjacent incumbents extending into the space.

Required Qualifications

• Prior experience as a CISO, Deputy CISO, or senior security executive (VP/Director of Information Security) is required - this role is intentionally sourced from the CISO community to bring firsthand business, technical, and operational credibility to the field.
• 10+ years of experience leading enterprise security programs, with direct, hands-on exposure to network segmentation, Zero Trust architecture, incident response and breach containment, or cloud security.
• Demonstrated ability to speak credibly to both engineering and executive/board audiences translating technical risk into business terms and back again.
• Demonstrated track record as an external-facing voice: conference speaking, analyst engagement, published thought leadership, or peer-community leadership (e.g., CISO forums, ISACs).
• Proven hands-on architecture and build capability - this is not a strategy-only role; the person must be able to personally build and demo complex technical environments.
• Demonstrated experience engaging CISO- and CTO-level stakeholders, ideally as a former peer, on strategic, multi-stakeholder decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to move fluidly between deep technical detail and executive narrative.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or equivalent experience.
• Willingness and ability to travel 30–50% for customer, analyst, and industry engagements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior title of CISO, Deputy CISO, Field CISO, or VP/Director of Information Security at an enterprise or mid-market organization.
• Direct operational experience running a segmentation, Zero Trust, or breach containment program.
• Experience with microsegmentation, CNAPP, cloud security posture management, or hybrid cloud detection and response tooling.
• Existing relationships with analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester, and others) covering network security, Zero Trust, or security operations.
• Experience integrating or building go-to-market plans around a new or acquired product line.
• Published thought leadership - blogs, whitepapers, podcasts, or conference talks - on breach containment, Zero Trust, or cyber resilience.
• Familiarity with the broader Illumio platform: Illumio Segmentation, Illumio Insights, container/Kubernetes segmentation, OT/ICS environments, and hybrid cloud architectures.

Our Commitment

Illumio believes that an environment of unique backgrounds, experiences, viewpoints, and individual contributions creates a culture of belonging, drives our future, and makes us stronger together in support of our customers and their success.

All official job offers from our company are extended directly by our recruitment team and will be sent through an official E-Signature document for your review and signature. Please be aware that we do not ask for any personal information in the process of extending offers of employment, such as financial details or social security numbers. Upon acceptance of any offer, we will request such information as part of the onboarding process prior to or on your first day of employment, and only after completing a background check through an authorized third-party vendor. If you receive any communication asking for personal details outside of these processes, please contact us immediately to verify the authenticity of the request. Your security is important to us, and we are committed to a safe and transparent hiring experience.

For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Illumio will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.