Senior Network Security Architect (Remote)

GovCIO; United States; Remote; USD 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

GovCIO is seeking a Master Network & Security Engineer to lead the design, operation, and optimization of enterprise network-security infrastructure. You will manage Palo Alto NGFWs, Panorama, and Cisco switching while guiding SOC, infrastructure, cloud, and leadership teams to reduce risk.

The role is located in the United States and fully remote, with responsibilities spanning architecture, incident response, and preventive improvements across security domains.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (three additional years if Bachelor’s degree); equivalent relevant experience may be considered.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in network engineering, network security, firewall administration, or security infrastructure operations.
• 6+ 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.
• Strong expertise in TCP/IP, IPv4/IPv6, DNS, DHCP, ARP, routing, NAT, VPNs, and packet-level troubleshooting.
• Proven experience designing or implementing network segmentation and microsegmentation solutions.

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.

Skills

Palo Alto Networks

PAN-OS

Cybersecurity Architecture

Network Security

High Availability

Firewall Administration

Zero Trust

Technical Leadership

Education

Master’s degree in Cybersecurity

Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Tools

Palo Alto Panorama

Strata Logging Service

Cortex XSIAM

Cisco Nexus

Cortex XDR

Job description

GovCIO is seeking a Master Network & Security Engineer to lead the design, operation, and optimization of enterprise network-security infrastructure. You will manage Palo Alto NGFWs, Panorama, and Cisco switching while guiding SOC, infrastructure, cloud, and leadership teams to reduce risk.

The role is located in the United States and fully remote, with responsibilities spanning architecture, incident response, and preventive improvements across security domains.