Security Engineer vs Systems Administrator
Measured from each occupation's own live postings: related jobs with a real gap between them. Posted pay favors the security engineer by about $33k at the midpoint. Salary bands, both switching directions, and the shared skills below, every number from live postings, refreshed nightly.
Security Engineer
571 open roles · security engineer salary · careers for security engineers
Systems Administrator
600 open roles · systems administrator salary · careers for systems administrators
The overlap, measured
Skills that appear in both occupations’ posting demand. This is the shared core; everything else on each side is the difference.
Switching, both directions
The asymmetry is the finding: security engineer → systems administrator reads 47% ready; the reverse only 31%. Skill overlap is not symmetric, and the direction you travel matters.
Security Engineer → Systems Administrator
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo.
The gap, from systems administrator postings: Brewing, SQL, SAP, Lean / Six Sigma.
The full route page: security engineer to systems administrator
Systems Administrator → Security Engineer
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo.
The gap, from security engineer postings: GCP, Clinical Research, SaaS, Clinical Skills.
Related comparisons
- Network Engineer vs Security Engineer70% peak overlap
- Penetration Tester vs Security Engineer70% peak overlap
- DevOps Engineer vs Systems Administrator62% peak overlap
- Network Engineer vs Systems Administrator61% peak overlap
- IT Support Specialist vs Systems Administrator43% peak overlap
- IT Support Specialist vs Security Engineer41% peak overlap
Which one do your skills favor?
Run the instrument with your own skill set and both readiness numbers recompute for you. Free, no account.
Quick answers
Which pays more, security engineer or systems administrator?
Security Engineer, by about $33k a year at the midpoint. Going by postings that state pay, the posted middle band for a security engineer runs $69k–$159k, and for a systems administrator it runs $54k–$107k. We only count postings that state a salary, so these are advertised figures rather than estimates.
Are security engineer and systems administrator the same job?
They are related but not the same. The postings share a real core of skills and then diverge. The skills both sets of postings want are Linux, Networking, Azure, Terraform, Cybersecurity.
Can a security engineer become a systems administrator?
Yes, and a typical security engineer profile already covers 47% of what systems administrator postings ask for. Our estimate for the transition is 12–24 mo. The route page lists the exact skills that make up the gap.
Can a systems administrator become a security engineer?
In this direction a typical systems administrator profile covers 31% of what security engineer postings ask for. Our estimate for the transition is 12–24 mo. It is worth noticing that the two directions are not symmetric: security engineer to systems administrator is the easier move (47% against 31%).
Method: each occupation’s salary band is the posted 25th–75th percentile from its own corpus; 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. Refreshed with the nightly scrape.