Security Engineer vs Solutions Architect

On pay, solutions architects come out ahead by about $22k a year at the midpoint of posted bands: $98k–$185k against $75k–$164k for security engineers. These are advertised figures from postings that state a salary, not estimates. By seniority and country: security engineer salary and solutions architect salary.

On skills, they are related jobs with a real gap between them. There is a shared core, and then each side asks for things the other rarely does. The skills both sets of postings want most are AWS, Azure, LLMs / Generative AI, LangChain / Agents, REST APIs.

Yes, and the numbers say how far along you already are: a typical security engineer profile covers 50% of what solutions architect postings ask for. Our estimate for the move is 12–24 mo. The instrument lists the exact skills that make up the rest.

Right now our board has 1,005 security engineer openings and 2,001 solutions architect openings, each linking to the original posting. The board refreshes every night, so the counts move with the market. Hiring the most security engineers at the moment: Direct employer (598), Argumed GmbH (5), Accenture (5). For solutions architects: Direct employer (1061), Amazon (24), Bright Vision Technologies (23).