Network Security Firewall Consultant

Hands-on experience designing, building, configuring, migrating, and supporting Check Point and Palo Alto firewalls across enterprise, data center, colocation, cloud, third-party, and industrial site environments.

Experience assessing as-is physical and logical networks, identifying deployment gaps, and producing low-level designs, bills of materials, migration plans, implementation runbooks, test plans, and rollback plans.

Strong knowledge of firewall policies, objects, NAT, zones, routing, BGP/OSPF, VPN/IPsec, high availability, clustering, segmentation, threat prevention, logging, and secure third-party connectivity.

Experience deploying and operating centralized firewall management platforms, including installation, onboarding, maintenance, upgrades, backup, recovery, and administrative access.

Experience with lifecycle management covering deployment, consolidation, hardware/software refresh, migration, decommissioning, and license or hardware coordination.

Ability to perform policy configuration, approval coordination, recertification, rule cleanup, optimization, duplicate/shadow rule analysis, and configuration-drift remediation.

Experience troubleshooting connectivity and firewall issues using packet captures, traffic logs, routing tables, session analysis, and vendor diagnostic tools.

Working knowledge of incident, request, problem, change, CAB, and configuration-management processes, preferably using ServiceNow.

Experience coordinating rack-and-stack or remote hands, go-live, migration, UAT, cutover, stabilization, knowledge transfer, and handover to operations.

Knowledge of secure segmentation, least privilege, ITAR/export-control requirements, and regulated delivery. Check Point CCSA/CCSE and Palo Alto PCNSA/PCNSE are preferred.

Good to have: AlgoSec, Panorama, SmartConsole, Cisco networking, Zscaler, AWS/Azure firewalls, load balancers, WAF, Nozomi, Splunk, and automation/scripting.

Roles & Responsibilities
Plan, coordinate, and execute firewall deployments in accordance with approved deployment processes, reference architectures, security standards, and site schedules.
Assess existing site and network environments to determine physical and logical requirements, identify gaps, confirm dependencies, and document prerequisites.
Develop firewall designs, configuration standards, bills of materials, procurement inputs, implementation plans, migration methods, test plans, backout plans, and handover artifacts.
Build and configure Check Point and Palo Alto firewalls and management platforms, including policies, objects, NAT, routing, VPNs, HA, logging, threat-prevention profiles, and administrative access.
Coordinate hardware, licensing, rack-and-stack, cabling, circuits, IP addressing, routing, DNS, monitoring, and remote-hands dependencies.
Execute firewall go-lives, replacements, migrations, consolidations, upgrades, and decommissioning across data centers, colos, points of presence, cloud, third-party sites, and other facilities.
Manage firewall and third-party connectivity operations, including incidents, requests, changes, approvals, troubleshooting, and vendor escalation.
Perform policy lifecycle activities including implementation, peer review, recertification, cleanup, optimization, drift remediation, compliance validation, and evidence capture.
Provide L2/L3 troubleshooting for connectivity, routing, VPN, NAT, HA, perfor mance, platform, and policy issues.
Perform or coordinate maintenance, patching, software upgrades, configuration backup, recovery testing, certificate management, health checks, capacity monitoring, and end-of-life refresh.
Support validation, UAT, cutover, hypercare, stabilization, SLA reporting, SOP creation, knowledge transfer, and formal handover to managed operations.
Follow approved ITAR/export-control, access, data-handling, change-control, audit, and records-management requirements.

Generic Managerial Skills, If any
Strong communication, stakeholder coordination, technical documentation, disciplined change execution, problem-solving, and ability to work independently with global network, cloud, cybersecurity, OT, site, procurement, and vendor teams.