A permanent search for a Cyber Security Engineer (WAF) — for a client in the financial-technology sector. The market was covered wall to wall in 21 days; what came back was more valuable than a lucky hire: a precise map of why the role, as designed, could not be filled — and what to change. This page is that map, numbers included.
WAF engineering is already a thin market in Poland. This brief narrowed it twice more — location and role design:
Web Application Firewall engineering — Cloudflare, Imperva, F5, Fidelis. Implementation and maintenance, mid/senior level.
Hybrid work from the Warsaw office — no fully remote option. After 7 days the search was narrowed to the Mazowieckie region for exactly this reason.
A strong sales component: the engineer joins client-facing meetings. Soft skills weren't a bonus — they were a filter.
120–190 zł net/h B2B — roughly 20,000–32,000 zł/month at 168h. Competitive, as the market would soon clarify, for some of Poland but not all of it.
Most vendors publish their winners' funnels. Here is a real one — including the stages where the market pushed back:
| Stage | Count | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Invited to the process | 1,528 | Full-market reach in three weeks — coverage was never the problem. |
| Responded | ~300 | A ~20% response rate — healthy for a niche outbound search. |
| Screening calls scheduled | 30 | Pre-qualification against the full brief, sales component included. |
| Screening calls held | 22 | 73% show-up rate. |
| Shortlisted to the client | 6 | 27% of screened candidates survived the brief as written. |
| Interviewed by the client | 1 | The narrowing above the funnel was done by the offer's terms — not by the reach. |
Process window: 1–21 February 2024. Search area: all of Poland, narrowed to Mazowieckie on day 7 when the hybrid requirement was confirmed as hard.
The offer band was 120–190 zł net/h. Here is where the market actually sat, by seniority:
| Level | Market expectation | Vs. the 120–190 band |
|---|---|---|
| Junior | 90–120 zł net/h | Fully covered. |
| Mid | 130–160 zł net/h | Partially covered, location-dependent. |
| Senior (Warsaw) | 170–250+ zł net/h | Above the cap — consistently, not occasionally. |
"Cloudflare I know well — I've been on it at a client for a year. Available in 1–2 weeks. 250 net an hour."
"I'm afraid I work at somewhat more 'European' rates :) — let's stay in touch."
Experienced Warsaw WAF specialists, February 2024. The highest declared rate in the process: 450 zł net/h.
The deliverable of this search wasn't a name — it was the diagnosis that makes the next search succeed. Each barrier came with a concrete fix:
| Barrier found | Fix recommended |
|---|---|
| Warsaw senior rates sit above the band | Revise the senior band for high-competition locations — or hire where the band works: candidates from southern voivodeships found the offer attractive. |
| Office requirement rejects the pool | Open the search nationwide with remote work and occasional Warsaw visits — the single most-cited reason for declining. |
| Sales component surprises engineers | State the client-facing element at first contact, so pure-engineering candidates self-select out before anyone's time is spent. |
| Seniors won't leave stable seats | Pivot the Warsaw profile to junior/mid with WAF growth potential, mentored by experienced office-based staff — that segment treats a move as opportunity, not risk. |
Any vendor can show you the search that closed in three days. We also show you the one where the market pushed back — because when we tell you a role is fillable, that claim is only worth something if we demonstrably say so when it isn't. Wide reach didn't rescue a mis-priced brief here, and we said so in writing, with the data. That diagnosis is the product.
Every hard brief gets one before the search scales: rate reality, location math, role-design friction — in numbers, not vibes.
This is one of 17 completed cybersecurity searches — the reads accumulate into the published benchmarks you can check us against.
Score any vendor — including us — with the vendor scorecard. The thresholds come from data like this page.
Bring the role you can't fill. Within days you'll know what the market actually says about it — rates, location math, role-design friction — and whether to search or to fix the brief first.
Book a Discovery Call — First CVs in 48hPut a slot in a calendar, or send the brief and we will come back to you. Either way you are talking to a partner, not a queue.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Whoever's calendar suits you — they take the call themselves.
Roles, platform, headcount, timeline. A link to a brief is even better.