Being a Software Engineer in the appliedid information security team I work to protect government systems from attack. It's a job that definitely makes you feel like you're playing an important role.
I really like the fact that I get to use different technologies and languages, including C, C#, Java and Assembly. Not only do I work on varied and interesting projects, but I'm also involved in the full development lifecycle. It means I get to communicate with the end users from the beginning of projects, right through to delivery, which is very fulfilling.
The training is great. I really feel like I'm keeping up-to-date as a programmer. This year alone I've been on three external technical courses (C# best practices, developing multithreaded applications and Windows operating system Internals). I've also been given some time to improve my knowledge of automated unit testing, and how to use the tools within Visual Studio more effectively to improve the quality of my code. Plus I got to attend the Virus Bulletin conference in Barcelona this year, which was a really interesting and useful trip.
Today I'm getting my project ready for compatibility testing. Thankfully we have a fully stocked virtual machine library, which allows the tests to be performed on multiple platforms automatically. That's another thing I like about it here, we get time and money to work on engineering improvement projects that help make it easier to do our jobs.