Computer Security

You will be recruited by organisations ranging from innovative start-ups to global technology companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and research institutes, in roles like:

• Cybersecurity Engineer
• Penetration Tester
• Cybersecurity Consultant
• Secure Systems Architect

Alternatively, you may also launch your own cybersecurity start-up.

Cyber security skills open doors right across the job market. Technology companies, banks and financial institutions, healthcare providers, cloud providers, security consultancies and national and European government agencies all recruit graduates with this profile, so you can choose the career path that fits you.

Most graduates start as security engineers, security analysts or penetration testers, working inside a team on a defined part of a system. Within a few years, many move into senior technical roles — leading a security team, designing the architecture rather than testing it, or specialising deeply enough to become the person an organisation turns to for one class of problem. Others move sideways into research, consultancy or a company of their own. Because the skills are systems skills, they stay relevant as the technology underneath changes.

Along the way you will have built a portfolio of hands-on security projects — from exploiting real vulnerabilities to designing the security measures that close them — that speaks for itself in any interview.

Or further specialise in research and apply for a PhD position at VU Amsterdam or other top universities around the world. Alternatively, you could join one of the world’s leading industrial research laboratories. Recent alumni have participated in high-impact research projects and have received prestigious recognition from the research community. For instance, the winner and the honourable mention of the EuroSys 2026 Roger Needham PhD Award for best PhD research in the entire field of computer systems are both alumni of our Master’s Computer Security.

If you have never seen an academic career up close, it is worth knowing what a PhD position actually is. In the Netherlands it is a paid job rather than a course you pay for: you are employed by the university, normally for four years, to carry out your own research programme and to publish it. Strong PhD candidates from this programme usually apply on the strength of their Master's thesis, which doubles as the writing sample, and several stay on to work with researchers of VU Amsterdam who supervised it.

Research careers are not confined to universities. The security teams of large technology and cloud providers run research groups of their own, publishing at the same conferences and working on the same problems, and our graduates are found in both settings.