Senior Cybersecurity Engineer – Network Security, Zero Trust & Automation
About The Position
As a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer on the Zero Trust and Security Engineering team, you will provide senior-level technical expertise for the design, implementation, integration, operation, sustainment, and modernization of enterprise cybersecurity platforms in a large, complex federal environment. The role focuses on network security, next-generation firewalls, Zero Trust and SASE capabilities, and security automation. You will engineer and sustain firewall and security platforms, manage policy lifecycles and changes, troubleshoot complex network and security issues, support deployments and migrations, and develop SOAR and API-based automation. You will integrate security telemetry across enterprise tools and evaluate AI-assisted security operations with appropriate human validation and guardrails. The position also involves cross-functional technical collaboration, documentation, assessments, audits, and compliance support. You may lead technical or project initiatives but will not have direct personnel-management responsibilities. This is a remote position with 40 scheduled weekly hours and travel required less than 10%. The role may require planned maintenance and change windows, occasional after-hours activity, and senior technical support for priority incidents when needed. U.S. citizenship is required, along with the ability to obtain and maintain the required federal suitability determination/background investigation.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, IT, Engineering, or a related STEM discipline and 10+ years of relevant experience; allowable substitutions may apply per contractual labor-category requirements.
- The job qualifications section also lists 7+ years of related experience.
- Significant hands-on experience engineering and troubleshooting enterprise next-generation firewalls in complex production environments.
- Strong experience with firewall policy lifecycle management, NAT, zones, segmentation, logging, optimization, and change control.
- Strong network-engineering fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, BGP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, VPN, TLS/SSL, PKI/certificates, packet analysis, and high availability.
- Experience with Zero Trust/SASE technologies and working knowledge of NIST SP 800-207 or comparable Zero Trust principles.
- Working knowledge of SOAR, security automation, APIs, workflow orchestration, and security-platform integration.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
- Ability to obtain and maintain the required federal suitability determination/background investigation.
- U.S. citizenship required.
- Ability to support planned maintenance and change windows, including occasional after-hours activities, and provide senior technical support for priority incidents when required.
Nice To Haves
- Palo Alto Networks NGFW, PAN-OS, Panorama, Prisma Access, Strata Cloud, or comparable technologies experience; direct Palo Alto experience is highly desirable.
- Python, REST API, JSON, webhooks, or similar experience.
- Experience integrating enterprise security platforms and telemetry.
- Experience with greenfield deployments, migrations, environment separation, or independently managed security environments.
- Federal, government, or highly regulated enterprise experience.
- Relevant professional certifications in network security, Zero Trust/SASE, cybersecurity architecture, security automation, cloud security, or network engineering.
Responsibilities
- Provide hands-on engineering for next-generation firewalls, secure remote access, segmentation, and related network-security services.
- Engineer, administer, troubleshoot, optimize, and sustain enterprise firewall technologies.
- Manage firewall policy lifecycles, including rules, objects, NAT, security profiles, recertification, cyber hygiene, optimization, and removal of obsolete or overly permissive policies.
- Lead firewall and security-platform changes, including impact analysis, testing, change control, rollback, validation, and documentation.
- Support Zero Trust and SASE capabilities, including ZTNA, Secure Web Gateway, Firewall-as-a-Service, secure remote access, segmentation, device posture, and policy enforcement.
- Troubleshoot complex issues involving routing, NAT, VPN, DNS, authentication, PKI/certificates, TLS/SSL inspection, logging, performance, and high availability.
- Support platform deployments, upgrades, patching, hardening, configuration management, vendor escalation, and platform-specific vulnerability remediation.
- Engineer and support SOAR, security automation, workflow orchestration, and API-based integrations.
- Develop automation for alert enrichment, IOC analysis and blocking, incident triage, ticket creation, containment, remediation, policy changes, and reporting.
- Integrate security capabilities and telemetry across SIEM/XDR, endpoint, identity, ITSM, vulnerability management, DLP, NAC, threat intelligence, cloud, and enterprise logging/data platforms.
- Evaluate AI-assisted security operations while maintaining appropriate human validation and guardrails.
- Support greenfield deployments, migrations, environment separation, coexistence, testing, and transition to operations.
- Collaborate with Security Operations, network engineering, IAM/ICAM, endpoint, NAC, vulnerability management, cloud, and infrastructure teams, and serve as a senior technical escalation point as needed.
- Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, SOPs, implementation and test plans, runbooks, troubleshooting guides, configuration baselines, as-built documentation, and change documentation.
- Support security assessments, authorization activities, audits, evidence collection, and compliance requirements.
- Ensure security-platform configurations and engineering changes align with organizational cybersecurity policies, technical standards, approved architectures, and change-management requirements.
- May serve as a technical or project lead for assigned initiatives; the position does not require direct personnel-management responsibilities.
- Support planned maintenance and change windows, including occasional after-hours activities, and provide senior technical support for priority incidents or service-impacting security-platform issues when required.
Benefits
- Medical plan options, including some with Health Savings Accounts
- Dental plan options
- Vision plan
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Full flex work weeks where possible
- Paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time
- Paid holidays
- Paid parental leave
- Military leave
- Bereavement leave
- Jury duty leave
- Typically 15 days of paid leave per calendar year for new employees, prorated based on date of hire
- Typically 10 paid holidays per year, prorated based on date of hire
- Paid Family Leave of up to 160 hours in a rolling 12-month period for eligible employees
- Short- and long-term disability benefits
- Life insurance
- Accidental death and dismemberment insurance
- Personal accident insurance
- Critical illness insurance
- Business travel and accident insurance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
