A security champion is a member of a development or product team who takes on security advocacy as part of their role, acting as the local point of contact between that team and the central security organization. The position is usually not a dedicated full-time job but an extension of an engineering, quality, or product role, most often formalized through a company's security champions program. The rationale is scale: security teams are almost always far smaller than the engineering population they support, so embedding knowledgeable advocates inside each team extends security's reach and brings judgment closer to where code and design decisions are made.
Responsibilities#
- Raise security considerations during design discussions and sprint planning.
- Help triage findings from automated scanners so developers are not overwhelmed by noise.
- Answer routine questions that would otherwise queue up with the central team.
- Shepherd threat modeling sessions for new features and track remediation of known issues.
- Help the team understand and adopt secure defaults, libraries, and patterns.
- Relay information both ways: carry policies, tooling changes, and threat intelligence into the team, and carry the team's friction points and constraints back out.
Skills and background#
- Stack knowledge: a solid grasp of the team's technology stack.
- Security literacy: familiarity with common weakness classes such as those cataloged by OWASP, and comfort reading scanner output and reasoning about risk.
- Judgment: the ability to recognize when something warrants specialist attention rather than deep offensive expertise.
- Communication: persuasion, patience, and credibility with peers, since the role is influence-based rather than authority-based.
Getting into the role#
People typically enter by volunteering or being nominated within an existing engineering position, then grow through program training and hands-on exposure to real findings and incidents. The background that suits the role is a working developer or engineer who already has the trust of their team and a genuine interest in security, rather than a specialist parachuted in from outside. Many organizations support champions with targeted training, a community of practice, recognition, and dedicated time, since a program without real investment tends to fade.
Career progression#
Over time, a champion deepens their security knowledge and may broaden their influence across several teams or mentor newer champions. The experience is a well-worn on-ramp into dedicated security work, and champions frequently move into specialist roles once they decide to make security their primary focus.
Related roles#
- Application Security Engineer: owns tooling and program-level defense across many teams.
- Secure Code Reviewer: concentrates on finding flaws in source.
- Product Security Engineer: owns the security of a specific product line.
- DevSecOps Engineer: embeds security controls into pipelines and infrastructure.