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.
