How much can you make in this career?
Before diving into specific dollar amounts, it is important to understand the pay structure for a cybersecurity sales engineer. It is not the pay structure most technical resources are used to, which in my experience is either a base salary or, in some cases, a base salary and a performance-based annual bonus. According to a recent industry study, the most common compensation structure for sales engineers in general is base salary plus a variable component; the split is usually somewhere in the ballpark of 80/20 or 70/30, with base salary being more heavily weighted. Base salary is a straightforward fixed amount, but the variable component will differ from company to company.
The variable component of the total compensation package is performance-driven. For sales representatives, the variable pay is usually commission-based, meaning they are paid based on how much they sell. The same is also true for sales engineers in many cases, but the...