Beyond the Usual Cybersecurity Jobs: Three Unconventional Career Paths
Summary
Three security professionals describe paths into application-risk assessment, threat detection, application security and satellite security, highlighting how transferable skills, stretch projects, mentorship and curiosity can shape cybersecurity careers.
Key points
- Jason Lane worked from systems administration toward application security and Android vulnerability research; he now assesses risk across roughly a million Amazon applications.
- Jason Goodman moved from customer service into internal threat work after building a dashboard to help identify potential misuse of customer account access, then transitioned through adversarial detection and application security.
- Goodman carried skills such as Splunk queries and detection logic across security disciplines and sought mentors by reaching out to people whose work he admired.
- Harshvardhan Chunawala began finding and responsibly reporting product flaws while in high school; he now advises AWS startup founders on security and teaches cloud and security courses.
- Chunawala worked as a mission operator for the Iris lunar rover and has written a guide to incident response for satellite operations; he highlights the need to protect remotely commanded systems and their ground stations.
- The article points readers to the NICE Workforce Framework, CyberSeek, AWS Skill Builder and CISA resources for exploring security roles and training.
Article Details
- Topic
- Nontraditional cybersecurity career paths and evolving security roles.
People
Harshvardhan ChunawalaSolutions Architect, AWS Startups, who reported security flaws in products and works on security guidance, including incident response for satellite operations.Jason GoodmanSecurity Engineer who moved from customer service into internal threat work, adversarial threat detection, and application security.Jason LaneSecurity Engineer whose vulnerability research experience informs his work measuring application risk at Amazon.