Network Operations Engineer — Palo Alto Firewalls

Project Context

This position carries day-to-day firewall operations across the IT estate, under a formal change governance regime. The second technology is either campus LAN or Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, ensuring that firewall changes are made by someone who understands the traffic they affect.

Goals and Deliverables

Responsibilities

Core Responsibilities

• Resolve incidents and service requests within agreed SLA targets, with structured troubleshooting and analysis before any escalation.
• Maintain complete, evidence-based ticket documentation; escalate to Level 3 only with full diagnostic detail.
• Own backlog hygiene, timely stakeholder updates, and disciplined shift handovers to guarantee operational continuity.
• Author and maintain Knowledge Base Articles and runbooks; identify repeat incidents suitable for shift-left to Level 1.
• Apply ITIL incident, change, and problem management, and comply with internal security and audit requirements.
• Contribute to Major Incident support, KPI reporting and operational performance reviews, and to problem management investigations.

Specific Responsibilities

• Administer PAN-OS on a daily basis: session analysis, policy lookup, commit failure recovery.
• Work in Panorama: device groups, template stacks, configuration push conflicts.
• Implement rule changes under the approval process in force; maintain rulebase hygiene and flag shadowed or over-permissive rules.
• Triage threat prevention events — IPS, antivirus, URL filtering, sandboxing — including false positives on business-critical flows.
• Support high availability, upgrade campaigns, and lifecycle activities.

Expected Skills

• Palo Alto
• STP
• VLAN
• 802.1Q