Senior Zero-Trust Security Engineer

Punch Cyber Corp; Reston (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Punch Cyber Corp in Reston, VA, seeks an experienced security architect to lead Zero Trust initiatives across people, processes, and technologies. You will design and implement identity-centric controls, network segmentation, and continuous verification to reduce risk and enable secure hybrid environments.

Ideal candidates bring deep knowledge of NIST guidelines, strong architecture experience, and a collaborative mindset to work across teams and after-hours maintenance as needed.

Qualifications

• 7 years of experience with a bachelor’s degree or 9 years of total experience.
• Ability to work in both an individual and team environment.
• Flexibility to support after hours maintenance activities.
• Must be able to obtain a Position of Public Trust.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the Zero Trust security architecture and strategy aligned with business and security objectives.
• Provide recommendations regarding agency perimeter UTM devices IAW NIST 800-53 and industry best practices for Cisco, Juniper, Riverbed, and Fortinate.
• Develop Zero Trust roadmaps, maturity models, and implementation plans across people, processes, applications, data, devices, and infrastructure.
• Establish identity-centric security controls, including strong authentication, MFA, SSO, identity governance, and least-privilege access.
• Design network segmentation and micro-segmentation to limit lateral movement and reduce attack surfaces.
• Implement continuous verification of users, devices, workloads, applications, and network connections.
• Define policy-based access controls using identity, device posture, risk, location, application, and behavioral signals.
• Establish device trust and endpoint security requirements, including device compliance, health checks, encryption, patching, and EDR coverage.
• Develop data-centric security controls, including data classification, encryption, DLP, access governance, and rights management.
• Define security telemetry and continuous monitoring requirements to support real-time risk-based access decisions.
• Integrate Zero Trust controls with cloud, hybrid-cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments.
• Assess existing infrastructure against Zero Trust maturity frameworks and reference architectures, such as NIST Zero Trust Architecture.
• Identify security gaps, vulnerabilities, architectural risks, and legacy dependencies that prevent Zero Trust adoption.
• Create architecture standards, patterns, reference designs, and security requirements for engineering and project teams.
• Continuously evolve the architecture based on new threats, technologies, business requirements, and emerging Zero Trust capabilities.

Skills

Zero Trust security

Security architecture

Identity management

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

NIST 800-53

Cloud security architectures

Job description

Punch Cyber Corp in Reston, VA, seeks an experienced security architect to lead Zero Trust initiatives across people, processes, and technologies. You will design and implement identity-centric controls, network segmentation, and continuous verification to reduce risk and enable secure hybrid environments.

Ideal candidates bring deep knowledge of NIST guidelines, strong architecture experience, and a collaborative mindset to work across teams and after-hours maintenance as needed.