Principal Cybersecurity Engineer – Firewall Policy Implementation (Artificial Intelligence (AI) Experienced)

We need to output HTML fragment with sections: About the role? The posting includes Role Summary, Key Responsibilities, Ramp-Up / Initial Focus, Long-Term Focus & Scope, Required Qualifications, Preferred Qualifications, Success Looks Like, Job Contribution, Education/Experience, Benefits, Weekly Hours, Time Type, Location, Salary Range. We must use

for section headings (e.g., About the role, Responsibilities, Requirements, Qualifications, Skills, Benefits, Pay, Schedule). We need to map content accordingly. Not repeat job title. No Job ID. Remove boilerplate (EEO, etc). No application instructions. We need to include sections only when posting has real specific content. So we need sections like About the role (maybe from Role Summary), Responsibilities (Key Responsibilities), Requirements (Required Qualifications), Qualifications (Preferred Qualifications?), Skills maybe from Success Looks Like? Benefits from perks. Pay from Salary Range. Schedule from Weekly Hours and Time Type? Also Location maybe not a heading but could be in a paragraph. We must not create sections with filler like "commensurate with experience". We have actual content. We need to preserve all substantive info. So we need to include details like responsibilities list, qualifications list, etc. We must use

• for any list of duties/requirements/benefits, and

  for prose. We need to decide which headings to use: About the role (role summary), Responsibilities (key responsibilities), Requirements (required qualifications), Qualifications (preferred qualifications), Skills (maybe from Success Looks Like or other skill details), Benefits (perks), Pay (salary range), Schedule (weekly hours, time type). Possibly also Location? Not required heading. We must not repeat job title. So no heading for that. We must not include Job ID etc. We must remove cookie/navigation/legal/EEO etc. So we will cut out the equal employment opportunity paragraph and the accommodation link etc. We need to preserve all substantive info: role summary, responsibilities, ramp-up, long-term focus, required qualifications, preferred qualifications, success looks like, job contribution, education/experience, benefits, weekly hours, time type, location, salary range. We need to format as HTML fragment. Let's craft:

  About the role

  Role Summary ...

  But we need to include the role summary text: "We are looking for a Principal Cybersecurity Engineer (Firewall Policy Implementation), with demonstrated AI experience to join our high-performing cybersecurity Team. This is a hands-on, deeply technical, engineering role for firewall experts with real-world Firewall Policy operations and management experience at the large-scale enterprise level. This position is not people management and is not intended for junior or mid-level candidates. Supervisory-only or Advisory-only level experience will not suffice for this role. You will be responsible for operating, maintaining, and optimizing Firewall Platforms, driving policy quality and consistency. Additionally, you will support troubleshooting and operational excellence across a complex, global environment. Over time, you will also help apply Operational Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve efficiency, reliability, and security. This is not a remote or hybrid position. This role requires onsite presence 5 days per week in the Charlotte, NC hub location. However, other hub locations, such as Dallas, TX; Bothell, WA; Middletown, NJ; or Alpharetta, GA may be considered for exceptionally strong candidate matches." We can keep that as prose. Then Responsibilities: we have a list under Key Responsibilities with sub-bullets. We'll create
  • each bullet. We need to include all bullet points: Security Implementation and Management, Firewall Policy Lifecycle Management, Execute Configuration Change Management, Troubleshoot Connectivity and Security Policy Issues and Outages, Identify and Drive Automation and AI Opportunities, Risk Assessment and Strategic Planning, Technical Support and Collaboration. Under each maybe there are sub-bullets? The text includes sentences after each heading. We'll treat each heading as a list item and include its description as part of that item (maybe as a

    inside li? But spec says use

    • for any list of duties/requirements/benefits, and

      for prose. Could embed

      inside li? Probably okay but safer to keep li text as plain text including the description. We'll just put the heading and its description as the li content. Then Ramp-Up / Initial Focus and Long-Term Focus & Scope could be part of Responsibilities or separate sections? Could be under Responsibilities as more detail. But we have a separate heading for Responsibilities; we could include those as part of responsibilities list. However the instructions: "Use

      for section headings (e.g. About the role, Responsibilities, Requirements, Qualifications, Skills, Benefits, Pay, Schedule)." So we should have those sections. We could treat Ramp-Up and Long-Term as part of Responsibilities (maybe as sub-sections but not required). To keep sections few, we can include them under Responsibilities as part of the list. Then Required Qualifications: list. Preferred Qualifications: list. Success Looks Like: list of bullet points. Job Contribution: prose. Education/Experience: maybe part of Requirements? Could be separate but we have Requirements and Qualifications sections. Education/Experience could be under Requirements (maybe as part of Required Qualifications). But we already have Required Qualifications list; Education/Experience is separate statement: "Bachelor’s degree (BS/BA) desired in Computer Science or Cybersecurity. 7+ years of related experience. Certification is required in some areas." Could be added to Required Qualifications list. Benefits: list of perks. Pay: Salary Range. Schedule: Weekly Hours 40, Time Type Regular. Location: maybe not a heading but we can include in a paragraph under About the role or separate? The instruction: "Do NOT put Job ID / requisition numbers as headings — fold minor metadata into a short

      or drop it." Location is not minor metadata? It's location info. Could be included in About the role paragraph (we already have location mention). So we can keep location info there. We must not create Pay/Schedule/Benefits sections unless posting actually states them. It does state them. Now produce HTML. Let's craft:

      About the role

      We are looking for a Principal Cybersecurity Engineer (Firewall Policy Implementation), with demonstrated AI experience to join our high-performing cybersecurity Team. This is a hands-on, deeply technical, engineering role for firewall experts with real-world Firewall Policy operations and management experience at the large-scale enterprise level. This position is not people management and is not intended for junior or mid-level candidates. Supervisory-only or Advisory-only level experience will not suffice for this role. You will be responsible for operating, maintaining, and optimizing Firewall Platforms, driving policy quality and consistency. Additionally, you will support troubleshooting and operational excellence across a complex, global environment. Over time, you will also help apply Operational Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve efficiency, reliability, and security. This is not a remote or hybrid position. This role requires onsite presence 5 days per week in the Charlotte, NC hub location. However, other hub locations, such as Dallas, TX; Bothell, WA; Middletown, NJ; or Alpharetta, GA may be considered for exceptionally strong candidate matches.

      Responsibilities

      • Security Implementation and Management: Optimize and implement firewall rules to mitigate risk, harden perimeter defenses, and protect systems, critical infrastructure, and customer data.
      • Firewall Policy Lifecycle Management: Own day-to-day firewall policy operations, management, tuning, cleanup, insertions, removals, and hardware decommissions.
      • Execute Configuration Change Management: Safely apply approved firewall policy changes within defined change processes, including validation and post-change verification to ensure changes are properly approved, documented, and meet intended outcomes.
      • Troubleshoot Connectivity and Security Policy Issues and Outages: Collaborate with architecture, engineering, and operations teams to troubleshoot outages and security incidents through identification, triage, analysis, containment, recovery, and root cause determination.
      • Identify and Drive Automation and AI Opportunities: Leverage AT&T-owned and managed instances of Copilot, ChatGPT, GitHub, Gemini Claude, etc., to reduce tedious manual process and improve accuracy.
      • Risk Assessment and Strategic Planning: Perform risk assessments and analyze complex security issues to develop mitigation strategies and reduce attack surface exposure, supporting forward-looking research, planning, and innovation in cybersecurity.
      • Technical Support and Collaboration: Provide technical support and expertise for security-related rollouts and issues. Work closely with IT, network, and business units to integrate security measures, and support various cyber-related projects.
      • Ramp-Up / Initial Focus: Learn the team’s environment, offerings, tooling, processes, and operating models. Complete structured onboarding: mentoring, coaching sessions, proficiency checks, and shadowing. Earn authorization/sign-off to independently execute Firewall policy changes and operational tasks as directed and participate in an on-call rotation for troubleshooting in coordination with AT&T’s Global Technology Operations Center (GTOC).
      • Long-Term Focus & Scope: Once fully integrated into the operational rotation, you will execute changes and navigate processes and systems to deliver Firewall policy updates, removals, monitoring/soak, and incident troubleshooting at enterprise scale as directed. As proficiency grows, you will help introduce and mature AI-assisted operations to improve throughput, reduce risk, and strengthen defense layers.

      Requirements

      • 7+ years’ experience operating and maintaining Firewall Policies (Rule Sets).
      • Extensive hands-on experience managing enterprise Firewall Policy in production environments.
      • Strong operational discipline: change control validation, closely following documented processes, rollback planning, and post-change verification.
      • Proven ability to troubleshoot Network/Security and Firewall Policy issues under time pressure.
      • Experience working in large-scale, complex environments with multiple stakeholders.
      • Bachelor’s degree (BS/BA) desired in Computer Science or Cybersecurity.
      • 7+ years of related experience.
      • Certification is required in some areas.

      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).
      • 8+ years of hands-on cybersecurity/network security engineering experience, including enterprise operations.
      • 5+ years of Palo Alto Networks (PAN-OS) Firewall platform and policy management in production environments.
      • Exposure to AI/ML-enabled operations, AIOps, or using AI tooling for incident reduction and efficiency.
      • Familiarity with metrics-driven operations (usage, hit counts, error rates, change success, MTTR, policy hygiene)
      • 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/OS