Firewall Operations Engineer

Job Description

This is an opening for a Firewall Operations Engineer to support a Department of State (DoS) Bureau of Diplomatic Technology (DT) program. This program provides transparent, interconnected systems and security supporting the DoS in successfully carrying out its U.S. foreign policy mission. DT provides enterprise architecture design, engineering, operations, and maintenance support services for servers, networks, firewalls, and enterprise applications across the Department.

This position provides general Tier 2 monitoring, configuration, and support to multiple firewalls and perimeter security systems. The position directly supports DoS on-site to provide perimeter security protection to over 80,000 customers globally.

Location: Beltsville, MD or Springfield, VA

Work Arrangement: Hybrid position requiring approximately 3 days on-site per week.

Work Schedule: Tuesday–Saturday, 3:00 PM–11:30 PM, subject to mission priorities. During the approximately 6–8-week training period, the schedule will be Monday–Friday, 7:00 AM–3:30 PM, with 5 days on-site.

Responsibilities

• Provide Tier 2 support in the monitoring, management, and troubleshooting of perimeter devices, including firewalls, proxies, and mail transport agents.
• Monitor ServiceNow application for Firewall Operations (FWOPS) incident and service requests.
• Implement firewall rules and policies, perform troubleshooting of firewalls (Palo Alto, Cloud Palo Alto, and FortiGate), Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA), A10 load balancers, proxy platforms, URL filtering across platforms, and analyze network traffic captures.
• Escalate issues as required to Tier 3 staff and monitor issues throughout a problem's life cycle.
• Perform recurring maintenance activities such as device reboots and software upgrades on all devices managed by the Firewall Operations Team.
• Record and report on firewall operations, utilization, and maintenance.
• Collaborate across Bureaus and Agencies to implement and repair network changes as they relate to perimeter security devices.
• Support Diplomatic Security Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) by implementing block requests for IP addresses, websites, and email addresses.
• Update architecture diagrams using Visio.
• Monitor and perform health checks on multiple perimeter security devices.
• Draft, coordinate, and publish outage notifications as required.
• Update shift logs and provide reports to leadership as needed.
• Maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs), work instructions, and other working documents.
• Attend calls requiring FWOPS team participation, including troubleshooting calls.

Qualifications

Required Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree and five (5) years or more of experience; Master's degree and three (3) years or more of experience. Additional experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.
• In-depth experience using Palo Alto Firewalls and Panorama monitoring tools to troubleshoot and configure firewall infrastructure. Strong understanding of networking, proxy, and packet filtering technologies.
• Minimum 3–5 years of IT Customer Support experience (Tier I and/or Tier II).
• First-hand experience supporting the monitoring and configuration of Firewall/DMZ infrastructure, including Network and Application Firewall Packet Filtering technologies (Palo Alto, Palo Alto virtual FW (cloud), FortiGate, Azure Firewall, Cloudflare, Cisco Email Security Appliances (ESA), A10 Load Balancer, and proxy devices).
• CLI experience preferred.
• Experience utilizing network monitoring tools such as NeuralStar.
• Experience with TCP/IP network implementation and troubleshooting.

Required Clearance

• U.S. Citizenship.
• Active interim Secret clearance with the ability to obtain a Top Secret clearance.