security engineers vs software engineers
how do these two engineers compare at different companies. specially the top tier ones like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. What about startups? Is a security engineer a software engineer plus more. Like an ML engineer in facebook who has ML experience in addition to being a great software engineer? or is the security role something different. Once you go deeper in it, converting to a mainstream software engineer is difficult. Has anybody changed tracks at these big companies. i know too many questions but i see a nice security role in google but wondering how good is it from future standpoint.
Security Engineers should be different than Software Engineers but sometimes at large companies Security Engineers are just SWEs with a security focus.
Thanks for the reply
We have both security engineers and software engineers in our security org. Security eng focus on security details - cryptography, security strategy, attack vectors, and generally other mathematical/statistical stuff. Software eng in security org builds security platforms. They don't need to know that much about security, I don't think.
what's the process for the Security Engineer (not dev for security, more like appsec) roles? what type of coding questions are asked?
In Amazon, no. Sec orgs have both sec engs and software engs. They have different interest and skill set in solving a problem. They used to try having sec engs building security automation tools in the past but it was proven a big failure. The same goes for applied scientists and software engs.
Thanks for your input