Lead Consultant - Network Security

About this role

At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life's uncertainties. And for more than 90 years, our innovative drive has kept us a step ahead of our customers' evolving needs. From advocating for seat belts, air bags and graduated driving laws, to being an industry leader in pricing sophistication, telematics, and, more recently, device and identity protection.

Job Description

Position Overview

We are seeking a Vended Application Lead Consultant Engineer to join our Network Security engineering team. This role will provide technical leadership for the engineering, automation, deployment, and lifecycle management of enterprise network security platforms.

The ideal candidate will bring a strong foundation in networking and network security, combined with experience applying modern software engineering and infrastructure automation practices to infrastructure platforms. This individual should be comfortable working with technologies such as Palo Alto Networks or comparable enterprise firewall platforms, while also having hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, Ansible, APIs, and automation frameworks.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can bridge traditional infrastructure engineering with a modern, automated approach to managing network security services.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a lead engineer and technical resource for enterprise network security platforms and vended applications.

• Engineer, maintain, and improve firewall and network security infrastructure across enterprise environments.

• Develop and promote an Infrastructure as Code approach for provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure configuration, validation, testing, and deployment.

• Develop automation using Ansible, APIs, scripting, and related automation technologies.

• Design solutions that reduce manual operational activities and improve the consistency and repeatability of infrastructure changes.

• Provide technical leadership for Palo Alto Networks firewall technologies or comparable enterprise firewall/security platforms.

• Partner with networking, cloud, application, security, and infrastructure teams to design and implement secure connectivity solutions.

• Troubleshoot complex network and security issues across application, network, firewall, and cloud environments.

• Establish engineering standards, reusable automation patterns, and technical best practices.

• Identify opportunities to improve platform reliability, resiliency, scalability, and operational efficiency.

• Participate in product lifecycle activities including upgrades, platform modernization, capacity planning, vulnerability remediation, and technology refreshes.

• Lead technical implementation efforts and provide engineering guidance to other members of the team.

• Create and maintain technical documentation, operational procedures, and engineering standards.

Required Qualifications

• Strong background in network engineering and network security.

• Strong understanding of core networking concepts including:
• TCP/IP

• Routing

• Subnetting

• NAT

• DNS

• VPN technologies

• Network segmentation

• Load balancing and application connectivity

• Experience engineering or supporting enterprise firewall platforms, preferably Palo Alto Networks or equivalent technologies.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code concepts, practices, and tooling.

• Hands-on experience with Ansible for infrastructure configuration and automation.

• Experience developing or supporting CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure or application deployments.

• Experience integrating infrastructure platforms through REST APIs or other programmatic interfaces.

• Working knowledge of scripting or programming languages used for automation, such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, or similar languages.

• Experience troubleshooting complex infrastructure problems across multiple technology domains.

• Ability to translate technical requirements into scalable and supportable engineering solutions.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to work across engineering, operations, application, and security teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Palo Alto Networks firewalls, Panorama, or related Palo Alto technologies.

• Experience managing network security infrastructure in public cloud environments such as AWS or Azure.

• Experience with source-control platforms and development workflows such as Git.

• Experience with CI/CD and automation platforms such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, or similar technologies.

• Experience working with enterprise IT service management and change-management processes.

• Experience creating reusable automation frameworks rather than one-off scripts.

• Experience working in an environment adopting product-oriented engineering and DevOps practices.

• Experience modernizing traditional infrastructure platforms through automation and Infrastructure as Code.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for more than someone who knows how to configure a firewall. The successful candidate will be an engineer who understands networking deeply and approaches infrastructure as an engineering product that can be automated, tested, version-controlled, and continuously improved.

They should be comfortable moving between troubleshooting a complex network connectivity issue, developing an Ansible automation workflow, reviewing a CI/CD deployment pipeline, and helping determine the future technical direction of the platform.

Core skill profile

Networking & Security: Strong networking fundamentals with enterprise firewall/security experience.

Infrastructure as Code : Experience managing infrastructure through repeatable, version-controlled automation.

Automation: Strong Ansible experience supplemented by…