Principal Cybersecurity Engineer – Firewall Platforms: Firewall Policy with Operational Artificial Intelligence (AI)

About the role

This position requires office presence of a minimum of 5 days per week and is only located in the location(s) posted. No relocation is offered.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end firewall policy lifecycle, including creation, review, implementation, optimization, monitoring/soak, and decommissioning of policy changes.
• Execute changes safely within defined change management processes, ensuring proper validation, documentation, and post-change verification to meet intended outcomes.
• Operate, maintain, and continuously tune firewall infrastructure to ensure compliance, performance, resiliency, and strong security posture.
• Troubleshoot connectivity and security policy issues in collaboration with architecture, engineering, and operations teams across enterprise environments.
• Progress from guided execution to full ownership of complex policy and operational activities, demonstrating increasing autonomy in managing enterprise-scale network security challenges.
• Deliver high-quality, secure changes at scale while effectively navigating enterprise systems, workflows, and operational frameworks.
• Support a 24x7 operational model, including participation in on-call rotations and coordination with the Global Technology Operations Center (GTOC).
• Identify and drive opportunities for automation and operational excellence, leveraging tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT to improve efficiency, reduce manual effort, and enhance accuracy.
• Contribute to continuous improvement by adopting AI-assisted capabilities and automation to increase throughput, reduce risk, and strengthen overall security effectiveness.
• Maintain high standards for documentation, repeatable processes, and operational readiness to ensure consistency and scalability.

Qualifications

• This is a Principal Position requiring direct, recent experience implementing, validating, and troubleshooting Firewall Policies.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience operating, maintaining, and managing firewall platforms in large-scale enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated expertise in firewall policy lifecycle management, including rule creation, optimization, cleanup, recertification, and audit-ready documentation—particularly within Palo Alto environments.
• Strong technical knowledge of firewall constructs (App-ID, User-ID, Content-ID, NAT, zones, security policies, and service objects) and the ability to troubleshoot complex issues involving rule matching, routing impacts, decryption, and application behavior.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot network and security issues under time pressure, delivering consistent resolutions and minimizing incident recurrence.
• Deep operational discipline with enterprise change processes, including risk assessment, validation/testing, rollback planning, and post-change verification.
• Experience using centralized management tools (e.g., Panorama/SCM Pro), including device groups, templates, commits, and log analysis.
• Proficiency in analyzing traffic using logs (Traffic, Threat, URL) and packet captures to validate policy behavior and outcomes.
• Track record of delivering firewall changes safely, accurately, and within SLAs, with minimal rework.
• Strong collaboration skills with cross-functional teams (network, application, operations) to drive timely outcomes in complex environments.
• Commitment to high-quality documentation, including development and adherence to repeatable procedures and runbooks.
• Demonstrated ability to improve operational efficiency and scalability through automation and AI-assisted workflows, contributing to stronger security posture and reduced risk.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) or equivalent cybersecurity certification (CISM, CISA, CRISC, etc.).
• Any Palo Alto certifications such as PCNSE / PCNSA (or equivalent demonstrated experience).
• Experience with Palo Alto CLI policy automation, orchestration, or "policy as code" approaches and Python policy scripting.
• Experience with Visual Studio Code, Jupyter Notebook, and Agentic coding using GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex (ChatGPT).
• Experience with AlgoSec, URL Filtering, WildFire, Threat Prevention, DNS Security, and security profile tuning.
• Experience with SSL decryption strategy/operations, including break/fix and exception handling.
• Exposure to AIOps / Operational AI use cases (e.g., anomaly detection, change risk scoring, incident summarization, knowledge retrieval, workflow automation).
• Experience integrating Firewall operations with ITSM and CI/CD tooling (e.g., ServiceNow workflows, change gates, automated validation).
• Familiarity with network fundamentals at scale: BGP/OSPF basics, VRFs, VLANs, IPsec concepts, DNS, and load-balancing impacts on traffic paths.

Pay

Our Principal Cybersecurity jobs earn between $155,400.00 - $261,100.00 USD Annual.

Schedule

Weekly Hours: 40
Time Type: Regular