Principal Security Engineer - PAN and Panorama

Responsibilities

• Serve as the principal technical lead and SME for the enterprise firewall program.
• Define and deploy global firewall standards, policies, and governance mechanisms.
• Drive enterprise wide firewall policy standardization across regions, business units, and environments.
• Create scalable firewall design patterns to support cloud, data center, and hybrid architectures.
• Continuously improve firewall architecture, security controls, and day to day operations.
• Own the lifecycle of firewall rules, including design, implementation, validation, and ongoing maintenance.
• Develop policy sequencing strategies to optimize performance, manageability, and security effectiveness.
• Conduct rule reviews, policy tuning, cleanup, and recertification tasks.
• Identify and remediate redundant, orphaned, shadowed, and overly permissive firewall rules.
• Apply best practices for change management, policy governance, and compliance requirements.
• Analyze firewall environments to uncover gaps, risks, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks.
• Assess current state and develop strategic roadmaps to modernize firewall operations and architecture.
• Promote advanced security capabilities including application based policies, threat prevention, DNS security, SSL inspection, and zero trust adoption.
• Collaborate with architecture and engineering teams to enhance segmentation and overall security posture.
• Identify and implement automation opportunities to improve operations, policy deployment, compliance reporting, and vulnerability remediation.
• Leverage AI, analytics, and machine learning to streamline security workflows and boost efficiency where applicable.
• Target reductions in manual effort through intelligent automation and infrastructure as code practices.
• Work with vulnerability management to automate risk based remediation and policy recommendations.
• Serve as the senior technical advisor for firewall engineering initiatives and strategic security programs.
• Mentor engineers and provide guidance on firewall and network security best practices.
• Coordinate closely with network engineering, cloud, infrastructure, security operations, and compliance teams.
• Influence enterprise security standards and contribute to long term cybersecurity strategy.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Information Security, Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in network security engineering within large scale enterprise environments.
• 5+ years of advanced experience with Palo Alto Networks Firewalls and Panorama.
• Firewall policy design and implementation experience.
• Security policy optimization and sequencing expertise.
• Network segmentation experience.
• Proficiency with threat prevention technologies.
• Enterprise security architecture background.
• Experience with multi site / global firewall deployments.
• Strong TCP/IP networking knowledge, routing and switching skills.
• Knowledge of network security architectures across hybrid and cloud networking models.
• Experience with Zero Trust security frameworks.
• Proven track record leading enterprise security modernization initiatives.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and communication skills; ability to translate findings into strategic recommendations.
• Certifications: PCNSA, PCNSE, and Palo Alto Cybersecurity Professional certifications.

Technologies

• Palo Alto Networks Firewalls
• Panorama
• Python
• Ansible
• Terraform
• AWS
• Azure
• GCP
• APIs
• SIEM
• SOAR