DevOps Engineer vs Security Engineer

Measured from each occupation's own live postings: mostly different jobs wearing similar names. Posted pay favors the security engineer by about $9k at the midpoint. Everything on this page is read from the two occupations’ own live postings and refreshed every night.

The short answer

$68k–$141kDevOps Engineer
+$9kSecurity Engineer, at the midpoint
$69k–$159kSecurity Engineer

On pay, security engineers come out ahead by about $9k a year at the midpoint of posted bands: $69k–$159k against $68k–$141k for devops engineers. These are advertised figures from postings that state a salary, not estimates.

On skills, they are mostly different jobs that happen to share a name or a hallway. The overlap is thin, which is often exactly why people search this pair. The readiness numbers further down say how far a typical profile on each side already reaches into the other, and which direction is the easier move.

DevOps Engineer

Posted pay, middle half$68k–$141k
FieldTechnology
Postings read5,100
Open right now600 (207 remote)
DemandHigh

Security Engineer

Posted pay, middle half$69k–$159k
FieldTechnology
Postings read2,786
Open right now583 (227 remote)

The overlap, measured

Skills that appear in both occupations’ posting demand. This is the shared core; everything else on each side is the difference. Each linked skill has its own page with the roles it unlocks.

Switching, both directions

DevOps EngineerSecurity Engineer

Not scored: the two sets of postings share too few skills in this direction for an honest number. Run the instrument with your own skill set for a personal read.

Security EngineerDevOps Engineer

32% skill readiness

Transition estimate: 12–24 mo.

What devops engineer postings ask for that security engineer profiles usually lack: Site Reliability Engineering, Git, Docker, Microservices.

Run this direction on the instrument

Open devops engineer roles right now

The freshest devops engineer openings on the board, from company career pages and remote boards. Apply at the source.

See all 600 devops engineer jobs

Open security engineer roles right now

The freshest security engineer openings on the board. Same rules: live, tagged to the occupation, linking to the original posting.

See all 583 security engineer jobs

See the whole board for both

1,183 live roles across the two, freshest first, with posted pay and remote flags where the posting states them.

Related comparisons

Which one do your skills favor?

Run the instrument with your own skill set and both readiness numbers recompute for you. Free, no account.

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Quick answers

Which pays more, devops engineer or security engineer?

On pay, security engineers come out ahead by about $9k a year at the midpoint of posted bands: $69k–$159k against $68k–$141k for devops engineers. These are advertised figures from postings that state a salary, not estimates. By seniority and country: devops engineer salary and security engineer salary.

Are devops engineer and security engineer the same job?

On skills, they are mostly different jobs that happen to share a name or a hallway. The overlap is thin, which is often exactly why people search this pair. The skills both sets of postings want most are CI/CD, Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Observability.

Can a security engineer become a devops engineer?

Going the other way, a typical security engineer profile covers 32% of what devops engineer postings ask for. Our estimate for the move is 12–24 mo.

How many devops engineer and security engineer jobs are open right now?

Right now our board has 600 devops engineer openings and 583 security engineer openings, each linking to the original posting. The board refreshes every night, so the counts move with the market. Hiring the most devops engineers at the moment: Bright Vision Technologies (8), BoschGroup (7), Name (7). For security engineers: Anthropic (14), ServiceNow (10), GitLab (7).

Method: each occupation’s salary band is the posted 25th to 75th percentile from its own corpus, counting only postings that state pay; readiness is coverage of the destination’s posting-skill weight; shared skills are read from the overlap waterfall. Pairs sharing too few skills are not scored in that direction. Job lists and counts are the live board. Refreshed with the nightly scrape.

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