Are you ready for a challenge?

Critical Start is reinventing the world of cybersecurity. Would you like to be part of the revolution?

Join our Critical Crew!

We are in continuous expansion and always looking to hire top talent like you. We are committed to focusing on our employees and enabling our teams to listen and learn together. We aim to foster a work environment that includes and embraces racial, ethnic, and gender diversity; along with other individual differences that allow our employees to flourish! We thrive on innovation, devoid of bureaucracy, and everything we do revolves around our three core principles:

Do what’s best for our customers.

Do what’s best for our employees.

Don’t do things that suck.

Don’t believe us? Hear from our team members about why they like working at Critical Start.

Rob Davis, CISSP

Founder & Executive Chairman

Working at Critical Start

Critical Start has a professional office environment, and the work we do holds immense significance, like saving customers from cyber risk. However, we believe in not taking ourselves too seriously. Depending on the role, you may work in office, remotely, or adopt a hybrid work model. Our HQ in Plano, TX offers open offices, collaborative meetings spaces, phone rooms, a wellness room, and a breakroom with games likes ping-pong, bubble hockey, foosball, and a gaming machine. We have recently opened new offices in Lehi, UT and Pune, India!

Savannah Overly

Sr. Security Operations Engineer

Who we are

Critical Start is turning the managed security services market on its head by taking a bold, new approach to stopping cybersecurity threats, and we need highly talented and motivated people like you to make this vision a reality! We work in a fast paced and fun environment, and as one of our core values to “do what’s best for our employees”, we want to nurture a culture that encourages collaboration, flexibility, and fairness that enable our team members to prosper! We are proud to provide reasonable accommodations to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions within our company. We are devoted to creating a space of inclusion and fostering a culture of belonging across our organization.

Jackie Allen

Account Executive

Critical Culture

We’re reinventing the world of cybersecurity, and our culture is a critical part of our values.

We foster an inclusive environment that encourages collaboration, flexibility, and fairness, enabling all team members to prosper.

With initiatives like our Employee Resource Groups, Culture Squad, and Buddy Program, we’re committed to creating a space of inclusion and belonging across our organization.

Join us and be part of the revolution in cybersecurity!

Learn More About Our Culture

Elena Khasanova

Vice President, Professional Services

Suhail Rahmetulla

Principal Operations Engineer

Want to hear what it’s like to be a part of our team? Listen to what our other Critical Crew Members have to say!

Watch Employee Testimonials

Work at one of the best places to work

Critical Start ranked 11th in Midsize Companies Category in The Dallas Morning News’ Top 100 Places to Work for 2022! The Dallas Morning News’ Top 100 Places To Work is conducted by its research partner, Energage, and is predicated on an extensive employee survey that celebrates excellence in areas such as company leadership, compensation, training, workplace flexibility, diversity and more. In 2022, the 14th year for the Top 100 awards in D-FW, a record-breaking number of nearly 6,000 deserving companies were nominated and more than 156,000 employees were surveyed.

We also ranked as #23 best mid-sized places to work in Dallas and #68 best places to work in Dallas on the Built In 2023 Best Places to Work list!

Apply to join our Critical Crew to work at one of the best places to work!

Benefits of working for Critical Start

Make a Difference

You will have a direct opportunity to drive significant shareholder, customer and employee value.

Learn New Skills

Enjoy a constant stream of new technologies—and new ideas—to learn and master.

Make an Impact

The work you’ll do will directly impact the experience of our customers and the industry as a whole.

Great Work Culture

Join an open, supportive and collaborative work environment.

Career Mentorship Program

Professional development is a high priority of Critical Start’s Executives. The Career Mentorship Program is a 6-month program dedicating at least 1 hour per month toward mentor career development.

What is mentorship?

Planned, ongoing and developing process facilitating improved performance and skills based on shared experiences
Exclusive, one-to-one, confidential and collaborative relationship designed to further the development and achievement
Introduces an independent and objective source of help outside of a direct managerial or supervisory relationship

How will employees be paired with a mentor?

Talent Management & HR will match mentee & mentor based on:

Developmental goals & needs
Aspirational experience
Time or location difference

What will mentees receive?

Support from an experienced colleague who can provide invaluable guidance in your career
A guide and FAQs on structuring the mentoring process
Individual Professional Development Plan Template

Meet some of the Critical Start team

EDUCATION
BA in Business Management & BFA in Dance, UMass Amherst

EXPERIENCE
Oracle, Black Duck, Avecto, BeyondTrust

RESPONSIBILITIES
• Strategic planning with our partners to build out revenue-generating marketing campaigns
• Run CriticalStart-only events that generate leads to bring back to the channel
• Create memorable brand experiences that bring the CriticalStart brand to life

MOTIVATION
I am motivated by the people around me to keep learning and improving. I love “stealing”
bits from people I work with to create my own toolbox, whether that’s a template, a way of
communicating, a presentation style, anything! I’m not sure what role I will have in 5 years,
but I know that I’ll be better today than I was yesterday.

CHALLENGES
Implementing scalable processes and wearing a lot of hats. But that’s half the fun of it, right?!

Allie Stevens
Senior Director of Channel & Field Marketing

EDUCATION
BS in Electrical Engineering, UT Dallas

EXPERIENCE
8+ years as a software engineer and site reliability engineer

RESPONSIBILITIES
Build and operate ZTAP, our product which supports the MDR business. Own delivery of my code and
features all the way to production. Participate in outage remediation and root-cause-analysis activities.

MOTIVATION
Currently studying for the OSCP exam to broaden my security knowledge

CHALLENGES
• New systems and components I have to familiarize myself with
• Growing pains since the company is growing very quickly

Jonathan Seawright
Principal Engineer

EDUCATION:
B.A. Communication Studies , California State University, Long Beach

EXPERIENCE:
5 years, Ingram Micro (Marketing); 1 year, SC Fuels (Sales)

RESPONSIBILITIES
•Build out effective partner marketing programs that map to channel marketing KPIs
• Collaborate with national and distribution channel account teams and the demand generation
team to build and develop content strategies that will boost pipeline goals
• Work closely with internal stakeholders, channel, and technology partner networks to drive partner marketing efforts

Katie Pollaro
Sr. Channel Marketing Manager

EDUCATION:
BS (H) in Computer Science | Delhi University
Post Graduate Diploma in Information Security | IGNOU
MS in Computer Science | California State University, Fullerton
EXPERIENCE:
Before becoming a back-end developer at Critical Start, I worked at several roles as a Student Assistant, Graduate Research Assistant and as an intern in different fields.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Developing software solutions, features, and enhancements for our MDR platform. Monitoring
production environment, troubleshooting production issues, improving Azure Sentinel detections through detection engineering, product integration, reporting.

GOALS
Gain knowledge and use it to make meaningful contributions towards better cybersecurity platforms.

Priyanka Sharma
Software Engineer II

EDUCATION
Graduated High School in 2016

EXPERIENCE
5 years in customer service in the Retail and Entertainment industries | 2 years at CriticalSTART

RESPONSIBILITIES
Manage MDR customers from onboarding through each renewal period | Build and maintain relationships with each customer, their teams and different partners in the account

GOALS
• Get customers to a solid state within their security posture by engaging all resources within CriticalSTART to make that happen
• Help people, learn new skills and find solutions to unique problems

CHALLENGES
• Without a security or IT background, there was a bit of a learning curve, but there is no better place to learn than CriticalSTART

Marshall Mechler
Sr. Customer Success Manager

How would you describe your work style?

Critical Start has upgraded our hiring process. We now use the Predictive Index (PI) to identify how you work. Through PI, we learn how you like to communicate and collaborate so we can build a team that’s more fun and more effective.