Firewall Operations Engineer

This is an opening for a Firewall Operations Engineer 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.

This position is within the Vanguard 2025 program, providing general Tier 2 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 or Springfield, VA and requires approximately 3 days on-site.

Shift is Tuesday - Saturday 1500 -2330 subject to mission priorities.

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.
• 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.