Career Guidance for Detection Engineers

As this book comes to a close, if you’re not yet working as a detection engineer, you may be interested in pursuing such a job. This chapter will aim to help answer some questions you may have and provide some guidance to assist in getting your first detection engineering position.

The chapter will cover the following main topics:

• Getting a job in detection engineering
• Detection engineering as a job
• The future of detection engineering
• Getting involved

The first section is focused on what to look for in job postings, training and certification opportunities, and further ways to develop your detection engineering skills. We’ll then discuss what a day in the life of a detection engineer looks like in terms of job responsibilities. Next, we’ll make some predictions on how detection engineering will evolve over the coming years. Finally, we’ll wrap up with ideas on how you can contribute to...

Getting a job in detection engineering

In this section, we discuss some information on preparing for and finding jobs in detection engineering, starting with what to look for in job postings.

Job postings

The role of a detection engineer is a relatively new one compared to many security and tech positions. As such, there’s not necessarily a standardized job title or description that you’ll find for roles related to detection engineering. For that reason, we must be able to understand the roles and responsibilities of a detection engineer to identify relevant job postings. In the most ideal scenario, the job position will be titled something that clearly indicates it’s a detection engineering role, such as Threat Detection Engineer. In some cases, however, you’ll find detection engineering roles categorized under the broader job title of Security Engineer. This is where an understanding of what a detection engineer does is required. Security engineering...

Detection engineering as a job

In a previous section, we mentioned some examples of responsibilities listed in job postings for detection engineers, which gave a high-level idea of the types of work you’d be performing as a detection engineer. Before we look in more detail at the roles and responsibilities of a detection engineer, we’re first going to discuss some related job roles and how they differ, as well as how those jobs can be used to show your experience in detection engineering when applying for jobs. While there are many sub-specialties in cyber security, we’re going to focus on a few roles that are most closely related to detection engineering in terms of the skills used:

• Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst
• Incident responder
• Threat hunter
• Threat intelligence analyst/threat researcher

All of these roles, while much different from a full-time engineering position, involve responsibilities that will either directly align...

The future of detection engineering

Detection-as-code is focused on applying engineering and software development processes and technology to detection creation. Therefore, we should continue to see maturity in processes and the adoption of tools and technology most prominently from the software engineering, data engineering, and machine learning fields. There are many external factors that will continue to influence and perpetuate the need for detection engineering. In addition, there are issues that consistently hinder detection creation and some new X-factors that we will need to see if they last through their hype. In the following sections, we have identified many of those areas and how they will affect detection engineering going forward. Writing predictions for the future is a dangerous task, so while we call these predictions, they are mostly trends in the field that we believe will continue the need for detection engineering.

Attack surfaces

The scope of what a company...

Summary

In this final chapter, we moved away from the details of detection engineering processes and pivoted our focus to detection engineering as a career. If you’re reading this book and not already in detection engineering, this chapter was intended to help guide you on your journey to a position in this field. We hope that the information provided here, as well as the skills learned throughout the book help increase your chances of landing such a role. If you’re already in a detection engineering role, hopefully, this chapter and the rest of the book help improve your skills and future in detection engineering.

We hope you enjoyed this book and wish you all the luck on your detection engineering journey!