Palo Alto Network Lead

A Leading Global Payment Technology Solutions Provider is seeking an authoritative Palo Alto Network Lead to direct and evolve its enterprise network security infrastructure. In this strategic technical leadership position, you will take full ownership of network architecture standards across complex Palo Alto and Cisco environments. Furthermore, you will establish network security policies, automated failover testing strategies, and DDoS mitigation frameworks. Consequently, this role is critical for safeguarding mission-critical payment processing environments.

The Palo Alto Network Lead must combine deep routing and switching expertise in BGP and OSPF with advanced firewall engineering and network automation scripting. Leading a dedicated team of network engineers, you will guide root-cause troubleshooting, author technical runbooks, and interface across SRE and infrastructure squads. Therefore, the organization is looking for a technical leader who manages enterprise IPsec/SSL VPNs and participates in operational on-call coverage comfortably. If you want to architect next-generation network security, this position offers an ideal path.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural design, deployment, configuration, and continuous optimization of Palo Alto network infrastructure.
• Establish, standardize, and govern configuration baselines across global Palo Alto and Cisco routing and switching estates.
• Enforce network security best practices, including next-gen firewall policies, encryption standards, and DDoS protection.
• Define comprehensive validation and testing strategies to ensure network performance, high availability, and failover redundancy.
• Mentor and lead network engineers in diagnosing complex network disruptions and fine-tuning traffic throughput.
• Author detailed network architecture blueprints, operational procedures, and emergency runbooks in Confluence.
• Drive network automation and infrastructure-as-code adoption using Python scripting, Ansible, and Terraform.
• Serve as the primary technical authority for networking, collaborating with SRE, cloud, and security teams.

Requirements and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Network Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• 10+ Years of experience managing enterprise Cisco and Palo Alto network environments, with 2-3 years in a technical lead capacity.
• Expert-level mastery of routing protocols (BGP, OSPF), TCP/IP networking, DNS/DHCP, and IPsec/SSL VPN architectures.
• Hands-on experience configuring and maintaining Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco switches, and network automation tools (Python/Ansible).
• Professional certifications preferred: Palo Alto PCNSE, Cisco CCNP, or CCIE.