Meet the engineers before the scanners

The fastest way to lose a development team is to run a scanner on day one and send them a spreadsheet of findings. They did not ask for it, they cannot tell which rows matter, and they now know you as the person who makes work. Hold the scanner for a week.

Your first job is to understand how software gets made here. That knowledge lives in people, not in a wiki. Book short, informal conversations with a handful of engineers from different teams. Ask them to show you, not tell you.

Who to meet in week one

• A senior engineer on the busiest product team. They know where the bodies are buried.
• Whoever owns the build and deploy pipeline. Often a platform or DevOps team.
• The engineering manager who is under the most delivery pressure.
• Someone building an AI feature, if there is one. These teams move fast and often have no security contact yet.
• Whoever answered security questions before you arrived. They may be relieved, or protective. Either way, they know the history.

Questions that open people up

• What part of the codebase are you most nervous about?
• When did a security request last slow you down, and was it worth it?
• What would you fix if you had a free week?
• Where do secrets and config live?
• What would you like from a security person that you are not getting?

Write down what you hear, word for word where you can. The phrases engineers use for their own worries are the phrases you will later use to explain why a fix matters. A finding described in their words gets fixed faster than one described in scanner language.

What you are really learning

Behind every conversation are three questions. How does a change go from an idea to production? Who can approve it? Where would an attacker most like to be? You do not need full answers yet. You need a sketch you can improve over the next month.

Rule of thumb:Rule of thumb: for every hour you spend with a tool in your first month, spend an hour with the people who will act on what it finds.

By Friday, aim to have a short list of names, a rough picture of the teams and two or three worries you heard more than once. That list is your first backlog, and it came from them, which makes it far easier to work on together.