AI Security Engineer
You find and close the ways AI systems get attacked — prompt injection, data poisoning, model theft, unsafe tool use.
Degree usually expected Hard, because it sits across two specialisms.
Can I actually do this?
Not a first job. It assumes either security engineering or ML engineering already; the material below is standards and taxonomy, not an introduction to either field.
Who it suits. People who instinctively ask how a thing breaks, and who can write the failure up so a team can act on it.
Runway. Realistic from a security or ML background; you need one of the two before adding the other.
Coming from security, or from LLM engineering? Either is a genuine half of this role — you are adding the other half. SOC Analyst LLM Engineer
Also advertised as
The route
Four stations, in order. Each one is a thing you finish before the next matters.
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Station one
Learn it free
Only the best few, deliberately. Every one of these is free to use — the pill on each card says exactly what is and isn't free.
OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications
Free to learn · no certificate
The reference list of LLM application risks (LLM01 onward, 2025 edition), free and open like all OWASP projects. The risk listing also lives at genai.owasp.org/llm-top-10/ — that page's title reads "LLMRisks Archive", which is WordPress taxonomy naming for a listing page, NOT a sign it is outdated.
Verified 2026-07-26
NIST AI 100-2 E2025 — Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations
Free to learn · no certificate
US government standards publication, free to download. Gives you the shared vocabulary for attack classes — useful precisely because it is the language auditors and regulators use.
Verified 2026-07-26
NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0)
Free to learn · no certificate
The governance framework much AI risk work is organised around. Free; a companion Generative AI Profile (NIST AI 600-1) exists alongside it.
Verified 2026-07-26
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Station two
Attest strategically
If you buy one here, understand what you are buying. CertNexus CAIP is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board to ISO/IEC 17024 — that accredits the exam body's process, not just a vendor's opinion of its own product, and no other AI certification in our research holds it. IAPP AIGP is governance-facing and we found no accreditation on its page. Neither publishes a price, so treat both as unbudgeted until you reach a checkout.
CertNexus Certified Artificial Intelligence Practitioner (CAIP)
CertNexus · CAIP
Free to learn · paid certificate Recognized
The honest cost Cost Not published
CertNexus does not print the exam fee on this page, rendered or not.Validity Not stated on the fetched pages. Renewal Not stated on the fetched pages. Assessment Certification exam, accredited to ISO/IEC 17024:2012 Proctored No Verify via unknown Cost per active year Unknowncannot be computed — no published fee Independently accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board — the only AI certification in our matrix that is.
Read this before you buyANAB/ISO 17024 accredits the CERTIFYING BODY's assessment process — a different and stronger claim than a vendor certifying competence on its own product. That is why it appears here rather than a vendor badge. Price, validity and renewal are all unpublished, so budget nothing until you see a checkout page.
Verified 2026-07-28 · Official page
IAPP Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP)
IAPP · AIGP
Free to learn · paid certificate Recognized
The honest cost Cost Not published
IAPP does not print the fee on this page, rendered or not. Membership status typically affects certification pricing at IAPP, so check while signed in.Validity Not stated on the fetched page. Renewal Not stated on the fetched page. Assessment Certification exam; IAPP publishes a free Body of Knowledge and Exam Blueprint Proctored No Verify via unknown Cost per active year Unknowncannot be computed — no published fee Governance-facing credential covering AI law, risk and responsible-AI practice.
Read this before you buyNO independent accreditation was found on its page — a dated absence, not proof it will never have one. Compare CertNexus CAIP above, which is ANAB/ISO 17024 accredited. Both are vendor-neutral AI certifications; only one is independently accredited, and that difference is the point.
Verified 2026-07-28 · Official page
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Station three
Prove it
A certificate says you passed a test. These say you can do the job.
A documented prompt-injection assessment
Take an LLM application, attempt injection and tool-abuse against it, and write the findings up against OWASP's LLM Top 10 categories so they map to language a security team already uses.
A guardrail that measurably reduces a failure
Add input/output filtering or a policy layer and publish the before-and-after rates. A guardrail with no measured effect is decoration.
A model-risk write-up mapped to a framework
Assess a real system against NIST AI RMF and state what you could not evaluate. Naming the gaps is the professional part.
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Station four
Get hired
Search these exact titles
Who hires for this. AI labs, financial services, healthcare, government contractors, and security consultancies building AI practices.
Write-ups mapped to OWASP or NIST language travel further than a generic security CV, because they land in vocabulary the hiring team's auditors already use — our reasoning, not a hiring statistic we have verified.
On salaryWe don't publish salary estimates. Numbers copied between blogs drift from reality, and a wrong number costs you real negotiating power. When we have a verified public source, it goes here with its date.
Where this route continues
- AI Safety Researcher — toward research on failure modes
- SOC Analyst — sideways move
- LLM Engineer — sideways move
Continues into AI governance and assurance work.
This page last verified 2026-07-26 · How we verify
All three resources fetched and READ 2026-07-26. Three OWASP URL variants were compared before choosing the project page as canonical; the "Archive" title on the genai.owasp.org listing was checked and found to be WordPress taxonomy naming rather than staleness. Credential facts carry over from the vendor-matrix rows verified the same day.