#2: AI/ML Security Engineer (The Top 10 Emerging AI Security Roles)
You develop AI-driven security solutions maintaining organizational defense awareness, detect capability weaknesses, and enable automatic responses to emerging threats.
If you missed the first of this series, catch up here: AI Cybersecurity Careers: The Complete Guide and #1 in our list, AI Offensive Orchestrator
These roles reflect current market studies, desired competencies, and evolving security threats, and are the result of two years of industry tracking. The focus: defending the nation’s new AI technological capabilities. These roles align with the national push for AI incident response and a skilled cyber workforce.
Next up in our list of Ten Emerging AI Security Roles:
2. AI/ML Security Engineer
Market: High demand, significant growth
Why you're desperately needed: You develop AI-driven security solutions maintaining organizational defense awareness, detecting capability weaknesses, and enabling automatic responses to emerging threats. Your intelligent systems learn your environment beyond human analyst capabilities.
Why demand is exploding: BlackMamba demonstrates polymorphic capabilities using OpenAI's API at runtime to produce fresh code variants per execution1. Industry-leading endpoint detection systems failed to detect this zero-detection polymorphic keylogger. The ShadowRay campaign compromised hundreds of Ray AI framework deployments worldwide2. AI systems function as both vulnerable targets and protective measures.
They're simultaneously the problem and the solution, which is either ironic or terrifying, depending on your perspective and caffeine intake.
Building organizational self-awareness:
Develop AI models automatically mapping your attack surface and revealing hidden vulnerabilities
Analyze security investments to produce capability improvement recommendations
Design defensive AI systems matching organizational risk tolerance and business goals
Engineer systems understanding operational constraints for security assessments
Transform technical security metrics into business impact assessments
Your AI systems function as permanent security consultants maintaining continuous operation. They know your business operations better than outside vendors and learn faster than human teams while delivering scalable information for growing organizational complexity. Think of them as the security analyst who actually reads all the logs instead of just pretending to.
Next in this series, I’ll share more on each of the these high-demand roles:
AI Cybersecurity Careers: The Complete Guide
Success requires more than technical knowledge. Rapid change makes continuous learning mandatory. Success depends on technical skills plus business acumen plus communication abilities.
Rob T. Lee | Chief of Research and Chief AI Officer, SANS Institute
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Ray Project: https://www.ray.io/
MITRE ATT&CK® campaign database https://attack.mitre.org/campaigns/C0045/