HireEthical Hacker
Penetration Testers

A Penetration Tester typically costs $9,050/mo – $12,250/mo in total monthly compensation for a senior hire working remotely, with an upward skew for US-based and executive roles. On top of base, budget 10–25% for equity or bonus and roughly 15–20% fully-loaded overhead. Exzev fees start from 12% of the hire's annual compensation, invoiced only after the candidate starts work, with a free replacement within 1–3 months depending on the role.

First shortlist lands in 48 hours. Most Penetration Tester searches close between two and six weeks end-to-end, versus a market average of roughly 55 days for this role and location. The main drivers are interview throughput on your side and how tightly scoped the brief is — we guide both before sourcing starts.

A senior Penetration Tester has run a real incident, passed a real audit and can defend design decisions to a board. Mid-level operators execute controls. In security, seniority is the difference between a SOC 2 pass and a breach post-mortem — always go senior for the owning seat.

A full-time Penetration Tester makes sense once the work is continuous and headcount-justified. For early-stage or one-off builds (a single product, a migration, an audit), a fractional or contract Penetration Tester is usually more efficient. Ask one question: will this person be fully utilized inside six months?

Yes. Our active talent pool for this role spans roughly 610 pre-vetted candidates across 30+ countries, most of them comfortable with async-first or overlap-based remote setups. We match candidates to your working hours, location preferences (EU, US, UAE) and compliance constraints (EoR, contractor, local entity) before they reach your shortlist.

Security candidates are screened on incident history, audit ownership and a live threat-modeling exercise against your stack. We verify claimed incidents through named references. Candidates who cannot walk through a real breach they handled — as an operator, not an observer — do not reach your pipeline.