Job Description & Details
This is a hands-on network security role where you'll spend your days wrangling Palo Alto firewalls, tuning Zscaler policies, and making sure Aruba ClearPass doesn't lock out half the company. If you like untangling complex routing issues and dealing with real security events instead of just writing policies, this gig will keep you busy.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend a good chunk of your time architecting, deploying, and tweaking Palo Alto firewalls and managing Panorama, alongside keeping the Zscaler ZIA and ZPA cloud security environments running smoothly. Days will rarely be boring—you'll bounce between configuring Aruba ClearPass for network access control, investigating real-time security alerts, and running vulnerability assessments. Expect to collaborate heavily with the broader IT team when network changes break things, and lead the charge on incident response root cause analysis when security events pop up.
The Core Tech Stack
You're going to need deep, production-level familiarity with Palo Alto Networks firewalls and Panorama, as the team relies heavily on them for perimeter defense and threat prevention. On top of that, solid hands-on experience with Zscaler (ZIA and ZPA) and Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager is non-negotiable since the entire access and remote architecture hinges on them. Combine that with a rock-solid grasp of TCP/IP, routing, switching, and VPNs, and you'll have the exact toolset needed to survive here.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring manager to throw a scenario at you where a remote user can't access an internal app through ZPA while everyone else is fine; they want to see if you methodically check the app connector groups, forwarding policies, and authentication logs rather than just guessing. They'll also likely grill you on how you handle a complex firewall rule migration in Panorama without dropping production traffic, looking for your approach to change management, staging, and rollback strategies.
Application Advice
To get past the automated screen, make sure your resume explicitly calls out your hands-on experience with Panorama, ZIA/ZPA, and Aruba ClearPass right near the top. Don't just list them as skills; write bullet points that prove you've actually deployed and managed them in enterprise environments, and weave in keywords like NIST, ISO 27001, and threat prevention to align with their security framework requirements.