Top 10 Cybersecurity Salaries

Cybersecurity job opportunities are exploding, with demand far exceeding supply. It’s a good time to be a cybersecurity professional.

Of course, it is a very challenging field to work in – practitioners have to contend with constantly evolving technologies and threats, and they operate under the pressure of knowing that even the smallest vulnerability or error can have potentially catastrophic consequences.

However, it is also a career that can be highly rewarding, both in terms of the value of the work being undertaken, and also the lucrative salaries that are on offer to those who reach prominent positions. With this in mind, Infosecurity has compiled the top 10 salaries by job role in cybersecurity. Our thanks go to technology recruitment firm Stott & May for providing these figures, which are based on a combination of placement data and candidate interactions over a rolling six-month period between September 2020 and March 2021.

We decided to provide an analysis of both the UK and US (East Coast), to give a broader picture of the highest paying roles in the sector on both sides of the pond. These figures relate only to permanent positions, and fall across three categories: manager/executive level; security architecture; and security engineering/operations. The figures provided are the average (mean) salary per annum for each of the positions listed.

US (East Coast)

1. $300,000 – CISO
2. $260,000  – Director, Application Security
3. $250,000 – Deputy CISO; Director, Security Engineering; Enterprise Security Architect; DevSecOps Architect
4. $240,000 – GRC Information Security Architect
5. $230,000  – Infrastructure Security Architect; Product Security Architect; Cloud Security Architect
6. $225,000 – Head of Information Security Risk; Senior Manager, Information Security Risk
7. $220,000 – Director, Incident Response & Security Assurance; Chief Security Architect; Network Security Architect; Digital Security Architect
8. $200,000 – Application Security Architect
9. $185,000 – Application Security Engineer
10. $180,000 – Cloud Security Engineer

UK

1. £200,000 – CISO
2. £130,000 – Director, Application Security
3. £120,000 – Director, Security Engineering; Director, Incident Response & Security Assurance; Chief Security Architect
4. £110,000 – Deputy CISO, Head of Information Security Risk; Director, Security Operations & Threat Management; Enterprise Security Architect
5. £105,000 – Director, Identity & Access Management
6. £100,000 – Application Security Architect; DevSecOps Architect
7. £95,000 – Senior Manager, Information Security Risk; SOC Manager; Digital Security Architect; Cloud Security Architect; GRC Information Security Architect
8. £90,000 – Infrastructure Security Architect; Product Security Architect
9. £85,000 – Network Security Architect; SOC Team Lead; Cloud Security Engineer; Application Security Engineer
10. £75,000 – Cyber Threat Hunter; Threat & Vulnerability Engineer; Software Security Engineer