What is a cybersecurity engineer?

Before we delve into what you need to do to become a cybersecurity engineer, it is smart to first define the role, as it is still a bit nebulous for many. A cybersecurity engineer is an information security professional that performs many functions including designing, developing and implementing secure network solutions to defend against advanced cyberattacks, hacking and persistent threats.

This role may go by another title, including IT/IA security engineer, data security engineer, and application/Web security engineer, but their role and function within an organization are the same. Cybersecurity engineers may work alone or on a security team within an organization.

As you can see, this position is a chock-full of opportunity to use your information security, networking, and even teamwork skills for the benefit of your organization.

Required skills

It’s important to remember that the exact skills required for a cybersecurity engineer role depend on the organization and how they view the role. Some have a tightly confined role in mind where the cybersecurity engineer performs certain role-specific tasks only and some organizations have a more flexible approach where the role may dip into several different pools of responsibility. Either way, view the skills below as being non-exclusive and may not apply to every organization.