DevSecOps Engineer Salary Guide 2026

Last updated: May 18, 2026 | By Robert Ardell

DevSecOps engineers in the United States earn a base of $115,000 to $185,000 in 2026, with senior and staff-level total compensation running $200,000 to $340,000 once equity and bonus stack on top. Public aggregators put the average between $102,000 and $183,000, a gap that says more about how each source counts the role than what the seat actually clears at offer.

Robert Ardell. I co-founded KORE1 in 2005 and have spent twenty-one years on the cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure side of our placement work. DevSecOps is the title that has changed most in the last three years. The 2024 job description and the 2026 job description share maybe six lines, and the comp band has moved with it. Hiring managers anchoring to a 2024 number lose candidates at the offer stage. We watched it happen seven times in the last twelve months.

Conflict disclosure, blunt version. KORE1 places DevSecOps engineers through our cybersecurity staffing practice, and we collect a fee on a closed hire. The bands below come from BLS, six public aggregators, and KORE1’s own placed-base from Q3 2025 through Q1 2026 across 41 closed DevSecOps and security-engineer searches. Where the public sources mislead the budget, I will say so plainly. Where you can build the band without us, the path is in the post.

The 2026 Salary Read, Source by Source

Seven sources sit on the table. Six are public. One is our internal placement record. Each one is honest about its method. None of them, taken alone, will give you a number that survives a competitive offer round.

Look at the spread. Glassdoor’s $183,389 and ZipRecruiter’s $101,752 are reporting on the same job title, in the same country, in the same calendar quarter, and yet they describe two completely different populations of working DevSecOps engineers who never overlap in the same hiring funnel except by accident. That is an $81,000 delta. It is not noise. It is the difference between what a self-reported total comp number captures from a 309-filer FAANG-heavy sample and what a scraped-listings base number captures from a much larger pool of mid-market and federal-subcontractor postings, and almost every budget conversation we walk into starts with one team holding the high number and another team holding the low one and neither side wanting to be wrong.

Glassdoor’s average is total pay. Base plus bonus plus the value of RSU grants at vest. It also pulls heavy from FAANG-tier and frontier-cloud employers, where 309 filers is enough volume to lock the average above $180K. The 25th to 75th band of $143,216 to $238,510 is roughly right for the senior tier at a recognizable cloud or fintech employer, and roughly wrong for everywhere else.

ZipRecruiter’s $101,752 is base only, scraped from active listings, with no employer filter. The active-listings pool oversamples mid-market, contract-to-hire, and federal subcontractor postings that anchor on a $95,000 to $115,000 band for what they still call a DevSecOps engineer. Half of those reqs are really cleared security operations work with a DevSecOps title bolted on for sourcing. The senior cloud-native population, where the title actually clears $170K base, is not getting hired off ZipRecruiter listings.

Salary.com’s $136,500 reads honest for the middle of the market. Employer-reported, base only, no FAANG skew, no listings drag. If you are budgeting a single DevSecOps hire at a Series C through public-market enterprise software company and you do not need a clearance, that band is close to the truth. The senior tier at $155,400 lines up with what we see clear at director-of-engineering-approved offers when the candidate has five-plus years and one real cloud certification.

BLS sits at $124,910. The SOC code is 15-1212 Information Security Analyst, which is the closest official occupational match the bureau has. There is no separate code for DevSecOps. The 10th-to-90th band of $69,660 to $186,420 covers the whole security-analyst population including SOC analysts and GRC, which drags the floor low. The 90th of $186,420 is where the BLS data starts to plausibly capture the senior DevSecOps tier. Government data lags. May 2024 numbers are still what BLS is publishing as of this quarter.

What Actually Drives the Spread

Three things move the band more than years of experience. Cloud stack ownership. Clearance. And whether the role is build-side or audit-side.

Cloud Stack and Tooling Specificity

The DevSecOps title sells like a generic skill set. The hiring reality is the opposite. We score every DevSecOps placement against the client’s cloud stack, the runtime, the CI orchestrator, and the policy-as-code layer. The same candidate, same years, same certs, will price differently for an AWS GuardDuty plus EKS plus OPA stack versus an Azure Sentinel plus AKS plus Checkov stack. The Azure population is smaller. The premium is real.

The tools that move the band right now, listed roughly by the size of the premium they carry:

• AWS-native security stack (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, KMS, IAM Access Analyzer). Largest candidate population, most price-competitive. Senior base lands $135,000 to $170,000.
• Azure security stack with Defender for Cloud and Sentinel adds a real premium because the pool is roughly 30% smaller. $145,000 to $185,000 base for senior. Microsoft and federal experience overlap is the spot the rate climbs another $5,000 to $10,000.
• Multi-cloud with Wiz, Lacework, or Orca. CNAPP platforms have eaten the SAST/DAST market in the enterprise tier, and senior engineers running them clear $165,000 to $195,000 base.
• Container security depth. Kubernetes admission control, OPA Gatekeeper, Kyverno, Falco. Adds $10,000 to $20,000 to the senior band. Staff-level with this depth runs $200,000 to $230,000.
• Policy-as-code maturity (Terraform Sentinel, Open Policy Agent, Cedar) is what separates a real DevSecOps engineer from a security operations hire with a new title. Senior clears $160,000 minimum.
• SBOM and supply-chain. Sigstore, in-toto, SLSA framework, Anchore. Narrow population, regulated-industry premium. $175,000-plus base for senior with this depth.

Where the public aggregators flatten all of this into one $130K national number, the actual band changes by twenty thousand dollars across stack lines, sometimes thirty thousand when you stack a clearance or a specialty platform on top of the cloud anchor and the candidate has three or more years on it. We have lost candidates at the offer because the client priced for a generic DevSecOps hire and the candidate had three years of OPA and Wiz on a multi-cloud pipeline along with two production CNAPP rollouts on his resume. He cleared $191K base elsewhere. The client had budgeted $158K, did not budge, and the search rolled into another quarter while the build-side seat sat open and the engineering team kept shipping infrastructure changes without policy enforcement.

Clearance and Federal Adjacency

An active Secret or Top Secret clearance moves a DevSecOps base $15,000 to $35,000 above the non-cleared equivalent in the same metro. A current TS/SCI with full-scope poly is its own market, and the cleared DevSecOps engineer with cloud-native depth is one of the hardest hires in the country right now. We placed two TS/SCI DevSecOps engineers into a federal systems integrator in Reston in Q4 2025 at $215K and $231K base. Both candidates had three competing offers. The clearance is the differentiator. The clearance plus EKS plus FedRAMP experience is the unicorn.

Build-Side vs Audit-Side

The same title sells two different jobs. Build-side DevSecOps owns the pipeline. They write Terraform modules with security baked in, they own admission control, they tune SAST and DAST and IaC scanning into something the engineering team will actually keep, they ship policy-as-code. Audit-side DevSecOps sits closer to GRC. They run compliance scans, build evidence packages, manage vulnerability management against a SLA, and they spend more time in spreadsheets than in Helm charts. Same title. Same job board listing. A $30,000 to $50,000 gap on the offer.

The market pays the build-side premium because the build-side seat is scarcer. Audit-side DevSecOps closer to GRC tooling clears $120K to $145K. Build-side with pipeline ownership clears $155K to $185K. Same number of years.

DevSecOps Salary by Experience Level

The bands below are KORE1’s placed-base, adjusted for what aggregators report against the same tiers. Total compensation includes base, target bonus, and the cash-equivalent value of equity grants where applicable. Federal and cleared roles run higher. Cloud-native pure-play startups occasionally run higher still, but they are pricing in equity volatility, not cash.

Mid-level is where most demand is sitting in 2026. The senior bench has not refilled since the 2022 hiring spike, and the candidates with five to eight years and real pipeline ownership are getting two offers per active search. We are seeing seniors land 12% to 18% above their last base when they switch, not the 6% to 8% the market told them to expect in late 2024.

Staff and principal compensation has stretched further than any tier. The gap between a senior at $185K and a staff at $245K is the biggest single jump in the table, and it tracks the scarcity of engineers who can hold technical depth across cloud, container, pipeline, and policy without dropping any of them. There are not that many of those people. Most of them are not looking.

Geography Still Moves the Band, Just Not Like 2019

Remote work flattened the metro premium between 2020 and 2023. Then 2024 and 2025 partially un-flattened it, because cleared roles cannot go remote, and the senior cloud-native employers have started enforcing return-to-office in the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and the DC corridor. The geographic premiums below are what we have actually seen close, not what listings advertise.

The remote band sits below the top-three metro band. That is new. In 2022 a remote senior DevSecOps role and a Bay Area senior DevSecOps role priced within $5K of each other. By 2026 the gap is $25K to $40K, and the gap widens at staff and principal levels because the equity component for remote-only is materially smaller at most cloud-native firms.

What Has Changed Since the Last Cycle

Three forces have moved the comp curve since 2024.

The SEC cybersecurity disclosure rule came online in late 2023 and started teeth-bearing in 2024. Public companies now have to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days, and the audit trail behind that disclosure runs through whoever owns the security pipeline. CISOs at public companies stopped treating DevSecOps as a nice-to-have hire and started treating it as a regulatory floor. The senior band shifted up about 8% in 2024 and another 6% in 2025.

The ransomware floor moved. The average ransomware payout from public reporting through 2025 was up over the 2023 baseline, and the average dwell time before detection is still measured in weeks for organizations without mature SDLC security. Cyber insurance carriers now ask for SAST, DAST, SCA, and SBOM coverage during the underwriting interview. That requirement flows down to the engineering team. It is what is driving the SBOM and supply-chain specialty premium I called out earlier.

And AI changed the threat surface. Every DevSecOps job description I have seen this year added something about AI model security, prompt injection mitigation, or RAG pipeline access controls, often pasted in by a hiring manager who was told by an internal stakeholder that the new role had to mention it. Half the time it is buzzword inflation. The other half it is real work, and the candidates who can speak to LLM application security are pricing themselves higher than DevSecOps engineers who cannot, especially the ones who can walk a hiring manager through how they have handled secrets in prompts, retrieval grounding, model output sanitization, and agentic-system blast radius without reaching for marketing language. We are seeing a $10K to $15K premium for senior candidates with one production AI-application security engagement on the resume. That premium was zero in early 2024.

What Hiring Managers Get Wrong on the Budget

The mistake we see most: budgeting against the Glassdoor average without separating total comp from base, then walking into the offer call with a band that the candidate’s current employer already beat two years ago at promotion time. A hiring manager reads $183K average, sets a $185K base offer, and gets the candidate on a phone call where the candidate’s current total comp at their cloud-native employer is $245K once you add the bonus and the unvested RSU runway nobody mentioned on the resume. Offer lands a week later. Candidate counters with a verbal at $230K base from a competing search. The original offer is dead. Same role, same year, same candidate, three different numbers in play, and a hiring manager who is now wondering why every senior DevSecOps engineer he interviews seems to be playing him against another offer. The base was off by $40K because the original number conflated base and bonus and equity into one figure that does not exist on a paycheck.

The second mistake: pricing for the title and not the stack. We do not budget DevSecOps engineers anymore as a single category. We budget AWS DevSecOps. Azure DevSecOps with Sentinel depth. Multi-cloud with Wiz. Cleared DevSecOps with FedRAMP. Each of those is a sub-band. Treating them all as one $130K national line item gets you the wrong candidate or no candidate. Our salary benchmark tool sits closer to what an offer should actually look like for the specific stack you are hiring against.

Third mistake: low-balling the bonus and equity component at senior. The Glassdoor 90th of $299K is not unusual for a senior with one specialty stack in a competitive metro. A $185K base with no bonus and a one-year cliff on a single-digit RSU grant is below market for that profile. The candidate knows it. Three of our last four senior DevSecOps closes had a competing offer at the time of acceptance. The base alone never wins on its own anymore.

The fourth one is subtler. Pricing on the assumption that the candidate will accept a counter-offer pause. Senior DevSecOps engineers, on average, get countered when they resign. The counter is usually 10% to 18% above the new offer. If you are not pricing 12% above the candidate’s current base, you should expect to lose them to the counter. We have seen this play out fifteen times in the last twelve months. The hiring managers who closed were the ones who priced for the counter from the first call.

How to Budget for the Hire

Use this sequence when you are setting a band. It is the same way we triage internally before a search opens.

1. Confirm the title is build-side or audit-side. Audit-side anchors at $125K to $145K base for senior. Build-side anchors at $155K to $185K. Be honest about which job you are hiring for. The job description is rarely as clear as the role itself.
2. Pin the cloud stack. Single cloud or multi-cloud. Pure AWS, pure Azure, GCP, or hybrid. Each one adjusts the band by $10K to $20K.
3. Decide on clearance. If you need a cleared candidate, add $20K to $35K to the base and add four to eight weeks to your time-to-hire estimate. If you do not need it, do not write it into the JD anyway. We have seen six clients block themselves out of the candidate pool by writing a “preferred clearance” line that turns into a hard filter on the recruiter side.
4. Set total comp, not just base. Bonus target plus annual equity value. The senior tier expects 10% to 20% target bonus and meaningful RSU grants at cloud-native employers, or a generous sign-on at private companies. Lead with the all-in number on the first phone call, not the base.
5. Price 12% above the candidate’s current base. This is the counter-offer floor. If you are unwilling to do this, expect to lose two of every three offers you put out.
6. Run the band by a recruiter before posting. Or by two recruiters if the search is competitive. You do not need to commit to a search to get a benchmark read.

If the role is competitive enough that you are reading this guide because your last three searches stalled, the conversation about where to set the band is the most useful call you can have this quarter. Talk to a recruiter on our team before you post. Twenty minutes saves the next cycle.

How DevSecOps Compares to Adjacent Roles

The roles below pull from overlapping candidate pools. Comp signals across them are useful when you are calibrating a DevSecOps band.

The cleanest adjacent comp is cloud security engineer. Same scarcity, slightly different center of gravity, similar candidate pool. If you cannot find a DevSecOps engineer at your band, a cloud security engineer with strong CI/CD fluency is usually the next closest hire, and the comp is in the same range. We have made that substitution on five searches in the last eighteen months. Three of them closed faster than the original DevSecOps search would have.

Common Questions Hiring Managers Ask Before They Open a Search

How fast does a typical DevSecOps search actually close?

17 days is our average time-to-hire for IT, and DevSecOps lands slightly above that line at 21 to 26 days for non-cleared senior. The first qualified submit usually lands inside ten business days, and the bottleneck is almost always the client interview cadence, not sourcing. Cleared TS/SCI searches run six to twelve weeks. The clearance population is finite, and we have been on a few that took two quarters.

Is a DevSecOps engineer the same job as a DevOps engineer with security training?

No. A DevOps engineer with security training will not pass our screen for a DevSecOps senior search. The build-side DevSecOps role expects ownership of admission control, policy-as-code, SAST and DAST integration, SCA, container runtime, and at least one CNAPP platform end-to-end. A DevOps engineer who took the CKS exam has the certificate. The seat needs the production scars.

What certifications actually move the band?

CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist) and the AWS Security Specialty are the two we see clear a measurable premium, around $5K to $8K at senior. The OSCP carries weight on the offensive side of security but does not move a DevSecOps base. CISSP signals senior tenure more than technical depth and is more useful for promotion than for hiring premium. The Practical DevSecOps and SANS GIAC tracks are credible. The Coursera and Udemy certs are not.

Should we hire a DevSecOps engineer full-time or use contract-to-hire?

Contract-to-hire works at mid-level. It does not work at senior. The senior DevSecOps candidates we represent will not entertain a C2H structure unless the rate is materially above market and the conversion timeline is under 90 days. If you need senior depth, budget for direct hire from the start. If you are growing a mid-level into the seat, C2H is a reasonable path that lets both sides test the fit. We do both.

How much will a counter-offer cost us if our candidate is currently employed?

Plan for a counter at 10% to 18% above your offer. The counter is the single biggest reason DevSecOps offers fall apart at the resignation stage. The fix is pricing 12% above the candidate’s current base on the offer itself, and pre-closing the candidate on what they will say when their current employer counters. We coach our placed candidates on the counter-offer conversation before the resignation call. It does not eliminate the counter. It eliminates the surprise.

Are remote DevSecOps engineers still earning the same as in-office hires?

Not quite. The fully remote senior band sits roughly $20K to $40K below the top three metros (Bay Area, Seattle, DC corridor) as of mid-2026. The gap was zero in 2022. The cloud-native cohort enforcing RTO is the main reason. Remote is still healthy. It is no longer the premium it was. If your hire is fully remote and you are competing against a Bay Area listing, you will need to win on something other than cash.

Will hiring a DevSecOps engineer replace our need for a SOC analyst or a GRC hire?

No. Different jobs. A DevSecOps engineer owns prevention at the pipeline. A SOC analyst owns detection and response at runtime. A GRC analyst owns compliance posture and audit. The titles get conflated in budget meetings. The work does not overlap enough for one to absorb the other. The DevSecOps hire reduces the volume of findings downstream. It does not eliminate the downstream function.

What is the realistic floor on a DevSecOps base before candidates stop responding?

$115,000 base for a junior with one to two years. Below that, candidates with real pipeline experience will not return the recruiter call in 2026. For mid-level the floor is around $125,000. For senior with cloud-native depth, the floor is $145,000 in metros and $135,000 fully remote. Postings below those numbers are filtered out before the candidate reads them.

The Recruiter Take

DevSecOps comp in 2026 reads honest if you stop averaging across three different jobs. Audit-side stays under $150K. Build-side at senior clears $170K to $190K base. Cleared, multi-cloud, and CNAPP-deep clear $200K-plus. Staff and principal break $245K. None of those numbers will surprise anyone running a current search. They will surprise hiring managers who last priced this role in 2023.

The Glassdoor average and the ZipRecruiter average are both real numbers. They are reporting on different jobs. Stop trying to reconcile them. Build the band from the stack you are hiring against. Run it past a recruiter who has placed this title in the last quarter. Then add the counter-offer cushion and price the offer once. The candidates worth hiring will not negotiate the band for you. They will accept a fair offer or they will sign with someone who priced it the first time.

If your last DevSecOps search stalled, or your offer-to-accept rate has slipped this year, the band is usually the culprit before the JD is. Reach out to our team and we will walk through the math against your stack. You do not need to commit to a search to get the benchmark read. You do need to do it before the next req opens, not after.

For more on the role itself, see our DevSecOps engineer hiring guide and the broader cybersecurity staffing hub.

About the author: Robert Ardell co-founded KORE1 in 2005 and serves as Strategic Advisor. Twenty-plus years of placement work across cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and defense.