Firewall Engineering Architect

The ideal candidate will serve as the lead architect for NASA’s Firewall Engineering domain, guiding a highly skilled team responsible for advanced security design, migration planning, policy development, and the integration of next-generation firewall technologies across NASA’s enterprise. This position requires deep technical expertise in firewall and network security engineering, strong leadership capabilities, and the ability to collaborate effectively with NASA senior leadership, program management, cybersecurity leads, and cross-functional engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Firewall Engineering Architecture Team, providing technical direction for enterprise firewall, IDS/IPS, and security control design and integration.

• Define NASA’s enterprise firewall architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with zero-trust, mission-security, and risk management requirements.

• Serve as the senior technical authority and escalation point for complex firewall, perimeter security, and cross-domain protection issues.

• Develop modernization roadmaps and standards for firewall performance, resiliency, rule/policy lifecycle management, and automation.

• Oversee large-scale firewall migrations, data center and cloud integrations, and enterprise segmentation initiatives.

• Partner with NASA and Leidos leadership to support proposals, technical volumes, and Basis of Estimates (BOEs) related to security architecture efforts.

• Drive innovation in areas such as firewall automation, orchestration, SDN-based security, cloud-native firewalls, and threat visibility enhancements.

• Establish governance processes for rule validation, configuration baselines, policy stewardship, and continuous monitoring.

• Mentor engineers, establish training pipelines, and promote technical rigor and standardization across the Firewall Engineering discipline.

• Deliver data-driven technical briefings and executive-level recommendations to NASA and Leidos senior management.​

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field (Master’s preferred).

• 8–12 years of experience in enterprise network security or firewall engineering, with 8–10 years serving in senior engineering, architectural, or leadership roles.

• Proven experience designing and managing large-scale, mission-critical firewall and perimeter security infrastructures.

• Deep expertise with next-generation firewall platforms (e.g., Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper) and enterprise-grade security services.

• Strong understanding of network architecture, routing/switching, zero-trust principles, intrusion detection/prevention, and segmentation strategies.

• Demonstrated ability to lead multidisciplinary engineering teams in complex, high-visibility operational environments.

• Experience supporting large IT infrastructure programs, including proposal development and BOE creation.

• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder engagement skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting government, aerospace, or NASA environments.

• Industry certifications such as CISSP, CCNP Security, JNCIS/JNCIP Security, PCNSE, or equivalent.

• Familiarity with cloud security architecture, cloud-native firewalls, and SDN-based security models.

• Experience leading geographically distributed engineering or security teams.

Clearance requirements:

• U.S. Citizenship is required.

• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance ranging from a Public Trust, at minimum, up to a Top-Secret clearance, as required.

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