How to Build a Security Champions Program That Actually Works

You don’t have the coverage you need. Your team can’t review every pull request, join every design discussion, or catch every flaw before it ships. And that's exactly where risk builds up. Quietly. Steadily. Until it’s too late.

Developers push features fast, while leaving security reviews lagging behind. So they start skipping them. Not of malice, but because they’re under pressure to deliver, and the process doesn’t scale. Meanwhile, your team is buried in tickets, scrambling to keep up, and forced into a reactive cycle that never ends.

That’s why Security Champions programs exist. But let’s be clear: slapping a title on a developer and calling them a “champion” doesn’t solve anything. You’ve probably tried the nice approach, light guidance, a few lunch-and-learns, maybe a Slack channel that’s been quiet for weeks. And you’ve seen how little it makes any difference.

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Table of Contents

1. Why most Security Champions programs fail
2. The real goal is distributed security ownership
3. What makes a good Security Champion (it’s not titles)
4. How to structure a Security Champions program that engineers respect
5. Train, equip, and reward like you mean it
6. Rethink how you train, support, and structure your Security Champions role

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Why most Security Champions programs fail

They’re vague, unsupported, and built more for optics than outcomes. You give someone a title, drop them into a Slack group, and hope they somehow turn into a security advocate. They don’t.

The core problem is structure (or the lack of it). Someone on the team gets nominated, usually because they’ve been around the longest, and that’s it. No time allocation, no role clarity, and no path to impact. You’re asking them to champion security without giving them the time, tools, or backing to actually do it.

And when that happens, nothing changes. Same issues keep showing up in reviews. Same back-and-forth with AppSec. Same fire drills. Only now, there’s someone wearing a champion badge who’s just as overworked and unclear as everyone else.

Here’s what that failure looks like in practice:

1. Champions aren’t involved in actual design reviews or security discussions
2. They don’t triage issues, influence fixes, or challenge risky decisions
3. Security questions still land directly with the AppSec team, because no one trusts the champion to handle them
4. There’s no measurable change in how fast or how early risks get flagged
5. Nobody tracks what’s improved since the program started

Another issue? Choosing champions based on rank instead of influence. A senior engineer might be respected technically but ignored when they talk about security. On the other hand, a staff-level dev who owns critical features and mentors others might be the one who actually drives behavior change. That’s the person you need.

And it’s not just about who you pick, but also what they’re accountable for. If there’s no clear scope or expectations, then they don’t know when they’re succeeding or failing. Neither do you.

What makes this worse is the lack of enablement. You can’t expect a developer to coach others on secure design, threat modeling, or risk tradeoffs unless they’ve seen what good looks like. Most programs don’t provide real training, contextual examples, or support from the AppSec side. The result is a champion network that doesn’t build confidence… it just sits there.

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The real goal is distributed security ownership

There's no need to ask developers to do AppSec's job. Instead, you can focus on changing how your teams operate so that security isn’t something bolted on at the end or passed off to another group. It becomes part of how software gets built: inside the actual engineering work, owned by the people closest to the risk.

Distributed ownership means security decisions happen within the team, during design reviews, code discussions, and feature planning. Because here, you’re not just giving engineers an escalation path, but the skills, context, and authority to recognize issues early and act on them. This changes the game in three key ways:

1. Threats get flagged earlier: Developers who understand common attack patterns, design flaws, and data handling risks can identify issues before they’re implemented. That’s a huge difference compared to finding them two weeks later during a rushed review.
2. Fixes happen faster: When the person writing the code also understands the security model, they don’t need to wait for someone else to weigh in on every decision. They spot problems, apply controls, and move on without dragging it through a long triage cycle.
3. AppSec gets to focus where it matters: instead of wasting time on basic misconfigurations or missing auth checks, your team will be looking for systemic patterns, high-risk areas, and helping teams tackle the hard stuff that actually needs deeper analysis.

This model only works when teams are equipped. Developers need to know what good looks like. They need examples, context, and real ownership over outcomes. Otherwise, you end up back in the same loop, with security bottlenecks, late reviews, and risk piling up quietly.

Scaling AppSec isn’t about adding more AppSec engineers every time coverage drops. It’s about getting developers to think like security, act early, and build defensible systems from the start. The Security Champions model can help you get there, but only when it’s designed to drive real ownership.

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What makes a good Security Champion (it’s not titles)

Who you're looking for is someone who's already operating like an extension of the AppSec team. Someone who knows the code, cares about quality, and has enough influence to actually shift team behavior.

These people don't usually raise their hands first. They’re the ones who’ve already flagged insecure patterns in reviews, helped clean up auth logic, or pushed back on risky shortcuts. They ask questions that go beyond functional correctness. They care about how systems behave under pressure and what could go wrong when things scale.

The traits that matter are consistent across teams:

1. Peer credibility: The team listens when they speak. This doesn’t mean they’re the most senior person, but they’re trusted. That trust translates directly into influence when it comes to setting code quality standards.
2. Curiosity: They don’t stop at fixing the bug. They want to understand the impact, the pattern, and how to prevent it next time. They’re the ones who ask why the same issue keeps showing up across services.
3. Code-level influence: They’re active in reviews. They shape implementation details. They set the tone for how done is defined in your org. When they push for stronger validation or safer defaults, the team listens.
4. Reliability: You need people who follow through. Champion work doesn’t need to be full-time, but it does need consistency. Someone who can’t keep up with their sprint already won’t be able to take on risk ownership.

Watch out for the usual failure signals. These are the signs your program will stall before it starts:

• You picked the most senior person by default
• You assigned champions based on the org chart, not team dynamics
• Someone volunteered because it looks good on a performance review
• Nobody actually vetted whether this person ever engages on security issues

There’s a better way to identify the right people, and it’s all in your engineering data. Look at who’s already touched security-relevant code. Check who’s contributed to past incident reviews, who’s fixed the most auth, input validation, or crypto bugs. Look at code review data. Who’s leaving comments that actually improve safety and robustness?

When you do that, you stop recruiting based on potential and start investing in people who already care about secure engineering. You’re basically recognizing a behavior that already exists and putting structure around it.

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How to structure a Security Champions program that engineers respect

You don’t get long-term engagement from developers by handing them a title and vague expectations. What you need is structure that aligns with how engineering teams actually work. That means clear scope, real time carved out in the sprint, and outcomes that show up in delivery metrics instead of just status updates.

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Security Champions need defined responsibilities

Champions should be decision participants. That means they own security outcomes inside their domain, such as in code quality, architectural decisions, incident readiness, and team-wide secure practices. Here’s what strong scope looks like across engineering workflows:

• Design phase: Participate in or lead threat modeling during design planning, reviewing data flow, auth models, integration risks, and service boundaries.
• Development: Review pull requests that impact security-critical logic (authentication, authorization, input validation, secrets handling) and contribute to secure coding patterns.
• Testing: Identify gaps in test coverage for security controls and help teams integrate misuse-case testing and static/dynamic checks.
• Deployment and ops: Ensure infrastructure-as-code templates follow secure defaults and that logging, monitoring, and RBAC controls are validated for the environments their service runs in.
• Incident response: Act as the first security contact when incidents affect their team’s code, supporting triage, containment, and post-mortem analysis.

This is real work that touches almost every stage of the lifecycle. Without a clear scope like this, champions will default to being passive, flagging issues but not resolving them, asking questions but not driving outcomes.

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Time has to be allocated explicitly and protected by managers

Security work doesn’t happen in leftover time. Instead, you need to schedule it like any other engineering function. Managers need to know what their champion is responsible for and agree to create space for it. Here’s what good alignment looks like:

• Champions have a defined number of hours or story points dedicated to security work per sprint.
• That time is tracked in the same system used for regular engineering work (Jira, Linear, etc.).
• Security initiatives have the same planning rhythm as engineering priorities: quarterly OKRs, sprint planning visibility, and retros.

Without this, security work always loses to roadmap pressure. And champions become less effective every sprint they’re deprioritized.

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Outcomes should be tied to security coverage

You need to measure whether the program is reducing risk. That means focusing on outcomes, such as what changed, where coverage improved, and how incidents dropped. Track metrics like:

• Threat modeling coverage: Percentage of net-new services or features with completed and reviewed threat models before implementation.
• Time to resolution: Median time between a security finding and a fix merged by team or repo.
• Review effectiveness: Frequency of repeat issues in secure coding areas (auth, access control, data validation).
• Incident readiness: Participation in IR drills, documented runbooks, and validated escalation paths for each owned service.

Each of these can be tied to specific services, teams, or repos, and champions should be accountable for driving improvements alongside their engineering leads.

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Structure creates leverage, lack of structure burns people out

Engineers respect roles that are scoped, scheduled, and measured. Just like any other part of the software lifecycle. When that structure is missing, champions default to reactive tasks, their work gets ignored, and AppSec ends up back in the loop anyway.

So before you roll out a program, make sure you’ve locked down:

• What the role owns
• When they’re doing the work
• How you’re measuring impact

Otherwise, you’re just putting a new name on the same old problem.

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Train, equip, and reward like you mean it

The most overlooked part of any champions program is investment. You expect engineers to take on security responsibilities, influence decisions, and improve risk posture. But what about training, tools, and a path forward? That’s how programs fail quietly: not because of bad intent, but because you underinvested in the people doing the work.

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Training has to be hands-on, contextual, and ongoing

Security champions are expected to lead threat modeling, review critical code, and advise on risk. That means they need a deeper skill set than your average secure coding module provides. The training has to match what they actually do. At a minimum, that should include:

• Hands-on secure coding labs tied to your tech stack and frameworks
• Threat modeling walkthroughs focused on real services, not generic templates
• Simulated red team or incident response scenarios to practice how they respond under pressure
• Labs or exercises on secure design patterns for APIs, auth systems, data flows, and cloud infra

This training needs to happen more than once. It should be revisited as your systems evolve, threat models shift, or new risk areas show up in post-incident reviews. Security Champion training is a standing commitment, and not a one-off workshop.

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Tools and playbooks need to be ready-to-use and inside their workflow

They don't have the time to build everything from scratch. If they need to run a threat model or lead a security review, they should be able to pull up a vetted template and go. If they’re coaching a team on safer design patterns, they should have reference examples that match your architecture. You need to equip them with:

Threat modeling templates scoped to architecture components

These should be tailored for microservices, serverless apps, APIs, and data pipelines instead of one-size-fits-all documents. Include prompts that help identify trust boundaries, data flow risks, and system dependencies.

Review checklists for specific security concerns

Break these down by category, such as input handling, auth logic, secrets, API exposure, infra misconfigurations, and map them to common design and implementation decisions. Good checklists prevent misses in high-pressure reviews.

Secure-by-default reference implementations

Provide internal examples of how your org handles RBAC enforcement, TLS configurations, API rate limiting, or secure token management. Don’t describe the concept. Show your teams already solved it.

A searchable internal threat library

Maintain a catalog of threats you’ve actually encountered, from auth bypass to SSRF to privilege escalation chains. For each one, include the affected system, detection methods, and remediation pattern.

Design pattern catalogs with contextual guidance

Curated examples of secure architecture patterns that map to your org’s environment, such as how to isolate sensitive workloads on Kubernetes, enforce secure defaults in Terraform, or configure zero-trust proxies.

IR playbooks with system-specific procedures

Playbooks need to cover what champions are expected to do during security incidents, like triage steps, log locations, escalation contacts, and rollback processes tailored to their service or stack.

Security onboarding playbooks

Give champions a package to onboard new teammates into secure engineering practices for their area. Include common risks, test cases, and what good looks like for that team’s architecture.

Integration with dev tooling

These assets should be accessible directly in PR templates, IDE extensions, or developer portals. If you bury them in SharePoint or Confluence, they won’t be used.

When your champions have immediate access to tools that reflect your environment and address real decisions they face, they’re far more likely to step into the role consistently and effectively.

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Rethink how you train, support, and structure your Security Champions role

Security leadership often underestimates how much risk accumulates in silence. As in through routine inaction, and not through catastrophic misses. A Security Champions program is one of the few levers that can shift that reality from the inside. But only when it’s treated as infrastructure.

This is all about velocity. The longer you rely on a centralized AppSec team to gate every critical change, the more delay you bake into your own roadmap, and the more risk goes unaddressed under deadline pressure.

The pressure will only grow from here. Developer productivity tools are accelerating output. AI is generating code faster than most teams can review. And unless you’ve embedded security judgment at the point of design and commit, your surface area will grow faster than your coverage.

Security Champions programs will either mature into distributed security teams that drive real decisions... or they’ll collapse under the weight of unclear scope and passive engagement.

Make the call now. Design the program with purpose, fund it with intent, and tie it directly to the systems you care about most. Anything less is organizational theater.

AppSecEngineer’s Security Champions training is built for exactly this shift. Your champions get practical, real-world security skills that apply directly to how code is written, including threat modeling for AI-generated systems. If you’re serious about security at scale, this is the next step worth taking.