Firewall Operations Engineer

SkyePoint Decisions is seeking a Firewall Operations Engineer to support a Department of State (DOS) customer. This position primarily supports operations and maintenance of foreign post network integrations with the DoS Core and other network integrations comprising a large and complex network infrastructure and cloud environments, with engineering and design responsibilities as warranted.

This role offers a hybrid schedule (~3 days onsite) at the discretion of the customer. The role can be located in Beltsville, MD or Springfield, VA.

Shift is Tuesday - Saturday 3:00PM -11:30PM subject to mission priorities. During the ~6-8-week training period, it will be 5 days on-site Mon-Fri (7:00am-3:30pm).

Responsibilities:

Provides Tier 2 support in the monitoring, management, and troubleshooting of perimeter devices to include firewalls, proxies, and mail transport agents.
Monitor Service Now application for Firewall Operations (FWOPS) incident and service requests.
Implements firewall rules and policies, perform troubleshooting of firewalls (Palo Alto, Cloud Palo Alto, and FortiGate), CISCO Email Security Appliance (ESA), A10 (load balancer), Proxy platforms, URL filtering across platforms, and analyzing 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 all devices underneath the Firewall Operations Team.
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 as needed.
Maintain standard operating procedures (SOP), work instructions, and other working documents.
Attend calls requiring a FWOPS team to attend, to include troubleshooting calls.


Required Qualifications:

Bachelors and five (5) years or more experience; Masters and three (3) years or more 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 3-5 years of 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 (Palo Alto, Palo Alto virtual FW (cloud), FortiGate, Azure Firewall, Cloudflare, Cisco Email Security Appliances (ESA), A10 (Load Balancer), and proxy devices.
CLI experience preferred.
Experienced in utilizing network monitoring tools such as NeuralStar.
Experienced with TCP/IP network implementation and troubleshooting.
Must be a U.S. citizen.
Active interim Secret clearance with the ability to obtain a Top Secret clearance.