Engineer III,Systems Network Job Houston area,Texas USA,IT/Tech

What You Will Do:

Define and maintain the enterprise network security infrastructure roadmap, ensuring alignment with Zero Trust principles, NIST 800-171/CMMC compliance frameworks, and business objectives.
Design secure, scalable, high-availability network architectures across on-premises, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
Develop network security best practices using industry frameworks and translate security policy requirements into infrastructure designs that enforce them.
Evaluate emerging technologies and provide architectural recommendations to IT leadership.
Serve as the technical authority on firewall, segmentation, VPN, and remote access infrastructure decisions.
Develop and maintain reference architectures, design patterns, and standards for network security infrastructure.
Evaluate and integrate technologies that provide comprehensive user-to-resource mapping across on-premises, cloud, and remote access environments.
Develop infrastructure standards for identity-based policy enforcement that reduce the attack surface and support Zero Trust maturity across the organization.
Design and implement a firewall policy cleanup and ownership workflow, establishing clear rule ownership, periodic review cadences, and decommission processes.
Lead firewall rulebase optimization efforts, identifying unused, shadowed, overly permissive, and redundant rules across security and NAT policies.
Identify repeatable, manual engineering workflows and lead the effort to standardize and automate them, reducing human error and improving deployment consistency.
Establish documentation standards and templates for the engineering team to follow, ensuring knowledge is captured and transferable.
Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to network and firewall engineers, ensuring engineering execution aligns with architectural standards.
Lead cross-functional collaboration with security operations, cloud engineering, identity/access management, and application teams.
Partner with the security team to understand policy requirements and translate them into infrastructure designs and configurations.
Serve as subject matter expert and escalation point for complex firewall, VPN, routing, and multi-cloud connectivity issues.
Support security audits, compliance assessments, and incident response with architectural context and technical expertise.

What You Will Need:

Education and Experience 8+ years of progressive experience in network security engineering, with at least 3 years in an senior engineer or technical lead capacity. Must include 5+ years of hands-on experience with Palo Alto NGFW and Panorama in a global enterprise environment with hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
Typically requires a college degree or recognized equivalent, preferably in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, from an accredited university or comparable on-the-job experience.
Technical certifications are a plus. Palo Alto PCNSA / PCNSE Cisco CCNP (Security or Enterprise) Cloud certifications (Azure, OCI, GCP) NIST / CMMC related certifications Cloudflare ASE/ACE, Zscaler ZDTA,ZDTE,ZDXA.
Knowledge,

Skills and Abilities

Deep expertise in designing enterprise-grade network security infrastructure across hybrid-cloud environments (on-prem, Azure, OCI, GCP).
Advanced knowledge of Palo Alto NGFW, Panorama (device groups, templates, template stacks, variables), App-, Threat Prevention, Global Protect, and Security Zone design.
Proven experience redesigning and optimizing large-scale firewall rulebases (1000+ rules) with a focus on segmentation, least privilege, and policy lifecycle governance.
Strong command of BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, VPC, HSRP, VLAN design, SD-WAN, and DMVPN architectures.
Extensive experience with IPSec VPN (site-to-site and third-party), Global Protect, SSL VPNs, SAML/MFA integration, and failover design.
Hands-on experience with Azure VNet, NSG, Azure Firewall, OCI VCN/DRG, and cloud interconnects (Megaport, Express Route).
Working knowledge of Zero Trust architecture principles, microsegmentation strategies, NIST 800-171, NIST 800-53, and CMMC frameworks.
Demonstrated ability to produce clear, actionable technical documentation including runbooks, SOPs, design documents, and training materials.
Ability to articulate architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.
Experience evaluating and implementing automation tools and frameworks for network infrastructure…

Engineer III, Systems Network