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

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 large‑scale enterprise level. The position is not people management and is not intended for junior or mid‑level candidates. Supervisory‑only or advisory‑only experience will not suffice. You will be responsible for operating, maintaining, and optimizing Firewall Platforms, driving policy quality and consistency, supporting troubleshooting and operational excellence across a complex, global environment, and over time applying Operational Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve efficiency, reliability, and security. This role requires onsite presence 5 days per week in the Charlotte, NC hub location; other hub locations (Dallas, TX; Bothell, WA; Middletown, NJ; Alpharetta, GA) may be considered for exceptionally strong candidate matches.

Responsibilities

• Optimize and implement firewall rules to mitigate risk, harden perimeter defenses, and protect systems, critical infrastructure, and customer data.
• 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.
• Troubleshoot connectivity and security policy issues and outages: collaborate with architecture, engineering, and operations teams to identify, triage, analyze, contain, recover, and determine root cause.
• Identify and drive automation and AI opportunities: leverage AT&T‑owned instances of Copilot, ChatGPT, GitHub, Gemini, Claude, etc., to reduce manual processes and improve accuracy.
• Perform risk assessments and analyze complex security issues to develop mitigation strategies and reduce attack‑surface exposure, supporting forward‑looking research, planning, and innovation.
• 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 cyber‑related projects.
• Ramp‑up / initial focus: learn the team’s environment, offerings, tooling, processes, and operating models; complete structured onboarding (mentoring, coaching, proficiency checks, shadowing); earn authorization/sign‑off to independently execute firewall policy changes and operational tasks; participate in an on‑call rotation for troubleshooting coordinated with AT&T’s Global Technology Operations Center (GTOC).
• Long‑term focus & scope: once integrated, execute changes and navigate processes to deliver firewall policy updates, removals, monitoring/soak, and incident troubleshooting at enterprise scale; as proficiency grows, 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