Palo Alto Firewall Network Engineer

Objective:

Provide operational support for Palo Alto firewalls (PA-Series, VM-Series) and Panorama management systems, ensuring availability, stability, and compliance of enterprise security infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

Incident Response & Troubleshooting

Respond to incidents escalated from Tier 1 (monitoring/NOC).

Troubleshoot issues related to:
Security policies, NAT, App-ID, User-ID
VPNs (IPSec site-to-site,)
Routing (static, OSPF, BGP), HA failover issues

Perform packet captures, log analysis, and CLI diagnostics.

Escalate unresolved issues to Tier 3 or Palo Alto TAC with documentation.

Configuration Management

Implement approved policy and configuration changes.

Maintain Panorama device groups, templates, and log forwarding settings.

Assist in deploying security profiles (Threat Prevention, WildFire, URL Filtering).

Validate commits and push changes to firewalls.

Apply content updates (Threat, WildFire, URL filtering) and confirm success.

Maintenance & Upgrades

Support PAN-OS and Panorama upgrades (e.g., 11.2.5 11.2.6).

Verify pre-upgrade content requirements (e.g., content version 8921).

Test post-upgrade functionality and rollback if required.

Ensure HA sync and stateful failover testing is completed.

Monitoring & Reporting

Monitor firewall performance, sessions, and HA health.

Validate SNMP/OID monitoring (e.g., SolarWinds Orion).

Generate monthly reports on traffic, threats, and system performance.

Security & Compliance

Ensure adherence to corporate security standards .

Support audits by providing firewall config snapshots and logs.

Validate that logging and threat prevention are enforced consistently.

Deliverables

Documented incident resolutions with RCA (Root Cause Analysis).

Change request implementation reports with rollback plan.

Monthly health and compliance reports.

Update device inventory and configuration backups.