Remote Senior Network & Security Engineer: Palo Alto Specialist

GovCIO; Jackson (MS); Remote; USD 120,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

EAP

Learning & Development platform

Certification assistance

Referral Bonus Program

Internal Mobility Program

Flexible Work Environment

Job summary

GovCIO is seeking a Senior Network & Security Engineer to lead design, implementation, and troubleshooting of enterprise network-security infrastructure. You will manage Palo Alto NGFWs with PAN-OS, Panorama, and Cortex XSIAM integration, ensuring high availability and secure segmentation across complex environments.

The role requires expert knowledge of firewall policies, VPNs, and Zero-Trust principles, plus strong leadership for incident resolution and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years (or commensurate experience).
• 7+ years of progressive experience in network engineering, network security, firewall administration, or security infrastructure operations.
• 5+ years of hands-on Palo Alto Networks firewall experience in a production enterprise environment.
• Advanced operational experience with Palo Alto Panorama, including multi-device policy management, templates, device groups, upgrades, configuration management, and troubleshooting.
• Strong hands-on experience designing, maintaining, and troubleshooting Palo Alto High Availability environments.
• Advanced understanding of HA1, HA2, HA3, configuration synchronization, session synchronization, failover behavior, link monitoring, path monitoring, peer health, and recovery processes.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, deployment, administration, and lifecycle management of Palo Alto Networks NGFW environments running PAN-OS.
• Own centralized firewall management through Palo Alto Panorama, including device groups, templates, template stacks, policy inheritance, upgrades, configuration backups, log monitoring, and firewall onboarding.
• Design and govern security policies using zero-trust, least-privilege, application-aware, and risk-based principles.
• Configure and troubleshoot security zones, NAT, virtual routers, static and dynamic routing, IPsec VPN, GlobalProtect, decryption, URL Filtering, Threat Prevention, WildFire, DNS Security, and App-ID policies.
• Lead enterprise network-segmentation and microsegmentation initiatives using security zones, VLANs, subinterfaces, virtual routers, routing controls, and application-based security policies.
• Develop secure controls for traffic between users, servers, applications, management networks, guest networks, IoT/OT devices, data-center workloads, and cloud resources.
• Architect, configure, test, and troubleshoot Palo Alto High Availability deployments, including Active/Passive and Active/Active designs as required.
• Resolve complex HA failures involving HA1 control links, HA2 session/state synchronization, HA3 packet forwarding, peer communications, configuration synchronization, monitoring failures, split-brain prevention, and failover recovery.
• Plan and execute HA failover testing, PAN-OS upgrades, disaster-recovery exercises, and maintenance procedures while minimizing service impact.
• Troubleshoot HA infrastructure dependencies, including cables, transceivers, switch ports, port channels, VLANs, routing, MTU, latency, packet loss, and redundant-path failures.
• Lead the configuration, support, and troubleshooting of Cisco Catalyst and Nexus switching environments.
• Design and support VLANs, trunking, STP/RSTP/MST, EtherChannel/port channels, HSRP/VRRP, Layer 2/Layer 3 switching, ACLs, QoS, switch security, routing, and access-control technologies.
• Diagnoses complex connectivity and performance issues through firewall logs, session inspection, packet captures, CLI diagnostics, switch counters, flow data, and network-monitoring platforms.
• Analyze TCP/IP behavior, including handshake failures, SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK flow, retransmissions, resets, timeouts, asymmetric routing, MTU/MSS issues, fragmentation, latency, packet loss, and NAT translation problems.
• Verify packet flow across firewall policy, App-ID, routing, NAT, decryption, threat prevention, VPN, switching, and server/application layers.
• Monitor firewall management-plane and dataplane health, including CPU, memory, session capacity, packet buffers, throughput, logging, and interface performance.
• Integrate Palo Alto NGFWs and Panorama with Strata Logging Service and Cortex XSIAM.
• Ensure reliable firewall log forwarding, cloud logging, log ingestion, data normalization, event availability, retention, and telemetry quality.
• Use Cortex XSIAM and XQL Search to investigate, correlate, and respond to firewall, endpoint, identity, cloud, and third-party security events.
• Partner with SOC teams to tune detections, investigate alerts, develop response procedures, improve visibility, and support incident containment and remediation.
• Lead root-cause analyses for major network or security incidents and deliver corrective and preventive action plans.
• Develop and maintain network diagrams, firewall-policy documentation, HA designs, runbooks, change plans, architecture standards, and operational procedures.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership during projects, production incidents, and security reviews.

Skills

Palo Alto firewalls

Panorama management

HA deployments

Cisco switching

Zero-trust security

TCP/IP troubleshooting

Policy design

Security incident leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Palo Alto PAN-OS

Palo Alto Panorama

Cortex XSIAM

Strata Logging Service

Cisco Catalyst/Nexus

GlobalProtect

Job description

GovCIO is seeking a Senior Network & Security Engineer to lead design, implementation, and troubleshooting of enterprise network-security infrastructure. You will manage Palo Alto NGFWs with PAN-OS, Panorama, and Cortex XSIAM integration, ensuring high availability and secure segmentation across complex environments.

The role requires expert knowledge of firewall policies, VPNs, and Zero-Trust principles, plus strong leadership for incident resolution and cross-team collaboration.