Firewall Engineering Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Firewall Engineering Architecture Team, providing technical direction for enterprise firewall, IDS/IPS, and security control design and integration.
• Define NASA’s enterprise firewall architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with zero-trust, mission-security, and risk management requirements.
• Serve as the senior technical authority and escalation point for complex firewall, perimeter security, and cross-domain protection issues.
• Develop modernization roadmaps and standards for firewall performance, resiliency, rule/policy lifecycle management, and automation.
• Oversee large-scale firewall migrations, data center and cloud integrations, and enterprise segmentation initiatives.
• Partner with NASA and Leidos leadership to support proposals, technical volumes, and Basis of Estimates (BOEs) related to security architecture efforts.
• Drive innovation in areas such as firewall automation, orchestration, SDN-based security, cloud-native firewalls, and threat visibility enhancements.
• Establish governance processes for rule validation, configuration baselines, policy stewardship, and continuous monitoring.
• Mentor engineers, establish training pipelines, and promote technical rigor and standardization across the Firewall Engineering discipline.
• Deliver data-driven technical briefings and executive-level recommendations to NASA and Leidos senior management.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field (Master’s preferred).
• 8–12+ years of experience in enterprise network security or firewall engineering, with 8–10+ years serving in senior engineering, architectural, or leadership roles.
• Proven experience designing and managing large-scale, mission-critical firewall and perimeter security infrastructures.
• Deep expertise with next-generation firewall platforms (e.g., Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper) and enterprise-grade security services.
• Strong understanding of network architecture, routing/switching, zero-trust principles, intrusion detection/prevention, and segmentation strategies.
• Demonstrated ability to lead multidisciplinary engineering teams in complex, high-visibility operational environments.
• Experience supporting large IT infrastructure programs, including proposal development and BOE creation.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• U.S. Citizenship required; must be eligible for NASA or Federal security clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting government, aerospace, or NASA environments.
• Industry certifications such as CISSP, CCNP Security, JNCIS/JNCIP Security, PCNSE, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with cloud security architecture, cloud-native firewalls, and SDN-based security models.
• Experience leading geographically distributed engineering or security teams.