Cybersecurity Engineer — Cloud, Network and Platform Security, US Employers

Technology companies, banks, health systems, manufacturers and government contractors across the United States hire security engineers to build and maintain the controls that protect their infrastructure. This is a building role rather than a monitoring one: where an analyst works the alerts, an engineer builds and tunes the thing producing them.

What the work involves

Designing and deploying security controls, running vulnerability management as a programme rather than a scan, hardening cloud accounts and Kubernetes clusters, automating guardrails so a misconfiguration is prevented rather than reported, and being the person the incident response team calls when something has to be changed under pressure.

Requirements

• Infrastructure you have actually built — networks, servers, cloud accounts or pipelines — before you were asked to secure any of it
• Cloud security depth on AWS or Azure: identity, logging, network boundaries and misconfiguration, which is where most cloud incidents begin
• Infrastructure as code, most often Terraform, because guardrails that are not in code do not survive contact with a delivery team
• Vulnerability management, threat detection tooling and secure architecture review
• NIST Risk Management Framework and SP 800-53 for federal and defence-adjacent work
• Container and Kubernetes security for cloud-native platforms

How the pay is structured

• Salaried roles sit against the BLS information security analyst occupation, which is where this work is counted: a $129,180 median as of May 2025, the lowest tenth under $75,090 and the highest tenth above $199,850
• Engineering titles sit above analyst titles in market data at the same seniority, because the work is building rather than watching
• Cleared roles pay a premium, for reasons about supply rather than difficulty

Before you apply

Ask what you would own in the first ninety days. A security engineering role with no infrastructure to change is a review role with an engineering title, and the difference shows up in your next job search rather than this one.

Check whether the role needs a security clearance. Federal and defence-adjacent engineering work, and Information Systems Security Engineer roles in particular, almost always do. A clearance requires US citizenship and an employer to sponsor it, and cannot be obtained independently — the requirement is often buried well down the advertisement.

Note: pay, on-call expectations, clearance requirements and any sponsorship decision are set by each employer — not by JobGader. Confirm the details on the employer's own advertisement before applying.