Senior Firewall Security Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior Firewall Security Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

💼 Employment Type: Full-Time

🎯 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through disciplined contract management, commercial excellence, risk control, and collaborative project delivery. Our distributed teams collaborate across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to maintain secure, reliable, resilient, and highly available technology environments supporting projects and business operations.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Firewall Security Specialist to design, implement, administer, monitor, and continuously improve enterprise firewall and network security capabilities across the organization. The ideal candidate will provide strong technical expertise throughout the network security lifecycle, from architecture and policy design through implementation, monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, optimization, and continuous improvement. This role will work closely with Network, Infrastructure, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Identity, IT Support, Project Management, vendors, consultants, and business stakeholders to protect critical systems and data while maintaining availability, performance, and compliance with applicable United Arab Emirates cybersecurity, privacy, regulatory, contractual, and organizational requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, configure, administer, and maintain enterprise firewall and network security infrastructure.
• Manage next-generation firewalls, perimeter security gateways, internal segmentation firewalls, cloud firewalls, and virtual firewall platforms.
• Develop and maintain secure firewall architectures aligned with organizational security objectives and network requirements.
• Create, review, implement, and optimize firewall security policies and access-control rules.
• Ensure firewall rules follow least-privilege, need-to-know, and defense-in-depth principles.
• Conduct regular firewall rule reviews to identify unnecessary, outdated, duplicate, overly permissive, or unused rules.
• Maintain accurate documentation of firewall policies, objects, configurations, network zones, interfaces, and security dependencies.
• Coordinate firewall changes through established change management, approval, testing, implementation, and rollback procedures.
• Assess security and operational impacts of requested firewall changes before implementation.
• Validate firewall configurations following upgrades, migrations, architecture changes, or major network modifications.
• Monitor firewall infrastructure for availability, performance, capacity, security events, and configuration issues.
• Analyze firewall logs, traffic patterns, blocked connections, allowed connections, security alerts, and anomalous network activity.
• Investigate suspicious or unauthorized network traffic and identify potential indicators of compromise.
• Support cybersecurity incident investigations involving malicious traffic, unauthorized access, scanning, exploitation attempts, command-and-control activity, and data exfiltration.
• Coordinate firewall containment and blocking activities during active security incidents.
• Develop and maintain procedures for emergency firewall rule changes during critical security events.
• Work closely with Security Operations and Incident Response teams to investigate and contain network-based threats.
• Integrate firewall logging and security telemetry with SIEM, SOAR, monitoring, and threat intelligence platforms.
• Develop and maintain firewall monitoring dashboards, alerts, reports, and security metrics.
• Analyze firewall events and network telemetry to identify emerging threats and recurring security issues.
• Perform proactive threat hunting using firewall logs, network indicators, threat intelligence, and known attack patterns.
• Configure and maintain intrusion prevention and intrusion detection capabilities where supported by firewall platforms.
• Manage URL filtering, application control, malware prevention, DNS security, botnet protection, and other advanced firewall security capabilities where applicable.
• Configure and maintain network address translation, port forwarding, routing, security zones, interfaces, and related firewall services.
• Manage VPN security configurations, including site-to-site VPNs, remote-access VPNs, encryption parameters, authentication, and access controls.
• Support secure connectivity between corporate offices, project environments, data centers, cloud platforms, remote users, suppliers, and approved third parties.
• Implement network segmentation and security controls to isolate critical systems, sensitive environments, operational networks, and high-risk assets.
• Support zero-trust and defense-in-depth security initiatives through appropriate network access controls and segmentation.
• Coordinate firewall integration with identity and access management systems, directory services, authentication platforms, and privileged access controls.
• Support multi-factor authentication and identity-based network access controls where available.
• Review firewall configurations supporting cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
• Coordinate with cloud and infrastructure teams to implement secure virtual networking, security groups, network access controls, and cloud firewall policies.
• Support secure connectivity for remote and hybrid work environments.
• Troubleshoot complex firewall, routing, VPN, NAT, DNS, application connectivity, and network security issues.
• Analyze packet captures, connection logs, routing information, and firewall diagnostics to resolve difficult connectivity and security problems.
• Identify and remediate firewall configuration weaknesses, policy conflicts, performance bottlenecks, and architectural risks.
• Conduct firewall configuration backups, restoration testing, and disaster recovery activities.
• Maintain high availability, redundancy, failover, and resilience for critical firewall infrastructure.
• Test firewall failover and recovery procedures to ensure continued availability of critical services.
• Plan and support firewall upgrades, migrations, replacements, and technology refresh initiatives.
• Conduct pre-change testing and post-change validation for firewall software, firmware, hardware, and configuration updates.
• Coordinate with vendors and managed service providers to troubleshoot complex firewall incidents and technical issues.
• Evaluate firewall technologies, security capabilities, licensing requirements, and vendor solutions to support future network security strategies.
• Participate in network and security architecture reviews for new projects, applications, infrastructure, and technology deployments.
• Review proposed network designs and identify firewall, segmentation, access-control, and security requirements.
• Provide security requirements and technical recommendations for new construction projects, offices, facilities, data centers, and technology environments.
• Support vulnerability management activities related to firewall appliances, management interfaces, software, firmware, and associated infrastructure.
• Remediate identified firewall vulnerabilities in accordance with organizational risk priorities and approved maintenance procedures.
• Maintain secure administrative access to firewall management platforms and restrict privileged access to authorized personnel.
• Support privileged access controls, administrative logging, session monitoring, and access reviews for firewall administrators.
• Ensure firewall administrative activities are appropriately logged, monitored, reviewed, and auditable.
• Conduct periodic reviews of firewall administrator accounts, service accounts, certificates, credentials, and authentication configurations.
• Support security audits, penetration tests, compliance assessments, and internal control reviews involving network security infrastructure.
• Maintain evidence and documentation required for cybersecurity audits, regulatory reviews, contractual requirements, and internal assessments.
• Ensure firewall security practices align with applicable United Arab Emirates cybersecurity laws, regulations, contractual obligations, organizational policies, and recognized industry standards.
• Develop and maintain firewall operational procedures, technical standards, configuration guides, and troubleshooting documentation.
• Prepare regular firewall security reports covering rule reviews, incidents, vulnerabilities, changes, availability, capacity, and overall security posture.
• Establish and monitor key performance and security indicators for firewall infrastructure.
• Identify opportunities to automate firewall policy management, monitoring, reporting, configuration validation, and repetitive operational tasks.
• Use scripting and automation where appropriate to improve consistency, reduce manual errors, and accelerate security operations.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to junior network security specialists, network engineers, and IT support personnel.
• Promote secure-by-design principles across network infrastructure and technology projects.
• Recommend improvements to firewall architecture, policies, segmentation, monitoring, resilience, and incident response capabilities.
• Support business continuity and disaster recovery planning for critical firewall and network security services.
• Participate in security exercises and simulations involving network compromise, malware outbreaks, unauthorized access, and service disruption.
• Maintain awareness of emerging network threats, firewall technologies, attack techniques, vulnerabilities, and industry best practices.