Senior Firewall Engineer (W2 only)

Terms of Employment

• Contract-to-Hire, 12 Months
• This position is predominantly remote. Candidates must be based in Maryland, Washington, DC, or Virginia to consider commuting to a data center in Reston, Virginia in case of a crisis. Furthermore, once or twice per year, there will be onsite work in Reston, Virginia for upgrade work.
• This position will require 24x7 on-call rotation. Once every two months, this individual will work Friday to Friday.

Overview & Responsibilities
Our client is looking for a Senior Firewall Engineer to provide Tier Two operational support while working with and maintaining the network firewalls (Palo Alto), load balancers (F5), and other security devices under the direction of the Security Engineering division. From a Tier Two perspective, the Senior Firewall Engineer will be responsible for tool updates and upgrades on firewalls and other tools such as IDS/IPS, SIEMs, EPPs, Access Management Systems, and more.

General responsibilities include:

• Operate and maintain network security infrastructure to support mission-critical operations.
• Oversee security infrastructure sustainment, maintenance, and advanced configuration of security tools (Palo Alto firewalls, F5 WAF, Illumio, Proofpoint mail gateways, IDS, AWS, and other security tools).
• Respond quickly and effectively to network issues, outages, and change requests.
• Recommend and perform system maintenance on network and security hardware/software.
• Utilize network monitoring tools to proactively address capacity, performance, and availability issues before service degradation occurs.
• Create and implement automation to increase efficiency, deployment velocity and reduce errors.
• Participate in 24x7 on-call rotation.
• Provide mentorship for other engineers on equipment/software.
• Cross train in-house to share knowledge and share workload.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of demonstrated experience configuring Palo Alto firewalls.
• Demonstrated experience with F5 web application firewall (WAF).
• Demonstrated experience with Illumio Microsegmentation.
• Demonstrated expertise of TCP/IP fundamentals, IP sub netting, routing protocols (OSPF, BGP), and network management.
• Demonstrated expertise of point-to-point, VPN, and other WAN connectivity options.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Demonstrated experience with AWS security tools.
• Demonstrated experience with Proofpoint Gateway (Email Security).
• Demonstrated experience with Splunk and Palo Alto SOAR.