Senior cybersecurity talent and rates in Lagos
Senior cybersecurity engineers in Lagos run roughly $32–$48/hr. Sub-700 seniors; most engagements remote-led. 2–4 week senior hiring loop. Operating timezone: WAT (UTC+1).
What cybersecurity actually requires in 2026
2026 toolset: SIEM (Splunk, Sentinel, Sumo Logic, Elastic), EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender), VM (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7), IAM (Okta, Auth0, JumpCloud), GRC (Vanta, Drata, OneTrust). Offensive: Burp Suite Pro, Metasploit, Cobalt Strike (licensed). Real senior security engineers hold OSCP/OSEP/CISSP plus 5+ years of breach response. The market's overfull of "compliance-checkbox security" — true offensive security depth is in the top 5% of the talent pool and prices accordingly.
Where Lagos senior cybersecurity talent comes from
Where Lagos senior cybersecurity talent comes from: Lagos senior talent flows from Flutterwave, Paystack (Stripe), Andela alumni, Interswitch, MTN Nigeria, plus University of Lagos + Covenant + UI CS programs. FinTech + mobile-money depth — Nigeria is Africa's largest tech market. For cybersecurity specifically, this means buyers can typically tap engineers who have shipped at one of these orgs before — relevant operational depth, not bootcamp graduates.