hmmm I am 50% with you. Imho to be an amazing engineer is to see a problem and find a good(whatever good means) solution. Beeing a good scientist is asking precise questions and finding experiments validating them.

I think its more the nuanced difference between safety and security. Engineers build things so they run safe. For example building a roof that doesnt collapse is a safe roof. Is the roof secure? Maybe I can put thermites in the wood...

this is the difference. Safety is no harm done from the thing itself Engineers build and security is securing the thing from harm from outside.

That is true, but security is similarly subject to the need to constrain threat models to those that are relevant. The scientist doesn't need to worry about mass production, the engineer (in most cases) doesn't need to worry about someone taking a chain saw to it.

Security will have a wider scope by default (unlike natural phenomena, attacks are motivated and can get pretty creative after all) but there will still be some boundary outside of which "not my problem" applies. Regardless, it's the same fundamental thought pattern in use. Repeatedly asking "what did I overlook, what unintended assumptions did I make, how could this break".

That said, admittedly by the time you make it to the scale of Google or Microsoft and are seriously considering intelligence agencies as adversaries the sky is the limit. But then the same sort of "every last detail is always your problem" mentality also applies to the engineers and software developers building things that go to space (for example).

Now I'm scared at the idea of termites with thermite!