firewall engineer

This is an opening for a Firewall Engineer/Team Lead 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. Program is named “Vanguard” and is an IT consolidation consisting of the Department’s servers, mainframes, network devices, network perimeter, anti-virus engineering, public key infrastructure (PKI)/biometrics/encryption, monitoring tools, telephony, mobile computing platform, virtual environment, and enclave design/security engineering. This is a firewall engineer position within the Vanguard 2025 program, providing general Tier II 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. This is a hybrid position based out of Beltsville, MD with 3 days on-site. Shift is MIDs (11:00pm-7:30am), Sun-Thurs after training. During the 6-8 week training period, it will be 5 days on-site Mon-Fri (7:00am-3:30pm).

Your responsibilities will include: Provides Tier 2 support in the monitoring, management, and troubleshooting of perimeter devices to include firewalls, proxies, and mail transport agents. Along with being a Team Lead for the MID shift. As the Lead you will be expectant to give a turnover of events for the past shift, create weekly Quad Chart, and be able to direct work to other firewall operations staff. Must be able to guide other staff on tasks assigned to the team. Review request for time off and stay in touch with the manager on all events happening on the shift.

• Monitor Service Now application for Firewall Operations incident and service requests.
• Implements firewall rules and policies, perform troubleshoots of firewall, email, and Proxy platforms for performance issues. Analyzes network traffic captures.
• Escalates issues as required to Tier 3 staff and monitors issues throughout a problem’s life cycle.
• Performs recurring maintenance activities such as device reboots and software upgrades on perimeter devices.
• Records and reports 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’s, 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 daily.
• Maintain standard operating procedures (SOP), work instructions, and other working documents.
• Attend weekly teleconferences, onsite meetings, and participate in working groups as required.

• BA degree and 6 years of experience; may accept additional experience in lieu of degree.
• In Depth experience using Palo Alto Firewalls and Panorama monitoring tools to troubleshoot and configure a Firewall infrastructure. Strong understanding of networking, proxy, and packet filtering technologies.
• Minimum 5 years IT Customer Support experience (Tier I and/or Tier II).
• First-hand experience with supporting the monitoring and configuration of Firewall/DMZ infrastructure including Network and Application Firewall Packet Filtering technologies (StoneGate, Palo Alto, FortiGate, Azure Firewall, Cloudflare, Cisco Email Security Appliances (ESA), A10 proxy devices).
• CLI experience preferred.
• Experienced in utilizing network monitoring tools such as Nagios and NeuralStar.
• Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2016 implementation and troubleshooting from a security/firewall perspective.
• Experienced with TCP/IP network implementation and troubleshooting.