Opticore IT is a specialist Network Engineer and Project Management consultancy offering a wide variety of opportunities to work within fast-paced, challenging environments across our client base spanning multiple sectors including Finance, Broadcast Media, Telecommunications and more.

Opticore IT are currently searching for a Senior Network Security Engineer with a strength in both Cisco Firepower and FortiGate to join the team on an initial 4-month contract (inside IR35) with scope to extend. This opportunity will require 2 days per week in the office in Central London.

You will act as a hands-on engineer and technical design authority for a firewall policy review and remediation engagement at a global financial markets bank, cleaning up and redesigning a Cisco FTD and FortiGate estate of around 4,000 rules, defining the technical standards it must meet and laying the foundations for Firewall Policy as Code.

What you'll be doing:

• Author the Rule Design Standard for Cisco FTD and FortiGate, covering naming, structure, permitted and prohibited constructs, mandatory metadata and the definition of a wide rule

• Design and own the vendor neutral rule schema (v1 and v2), with worked examples for both platforms, forming the Policy as Code data model

• Specify the fields, validation and workflow of the Ivanti firewall request catalogue item ready for client configuration.

• Validate access, tooling and Elastic log coverage across all in-scope devices (2x FMC, 10x FTD, 8x FortiGate)

• Technically review the AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer baseline, risk rank findings and present baseline measures to client engineering

• Carry out dependency analysis of rules with no attributable owner before they are routed to risk acceptance

• Produce change packs with rollback plans to remove unused, shadowed, redundant and expired rules, and implement them out of hours under the client's CAB

• Analyse observed flows in Elastic, including month end and quarter end traffic, to design explicit service rules that replace wide and overly permissive rules

• Confirm resilient and failover paths before any rule is judged unused, then monitor hit counts, disable with a rollback window and remove the original rule

• Define how DC Refresh replacement firewalls are brought into the standard and schema from day one

• Produce the Firewall Policy as Code high-level design, covering architecture, validation pipeline and integration with Ivanti, change control and AlgoSec.

What you'll bring:

• Cisco Firepower (FMC/FTD) & FortiGate Policy Engineering

• Large Scale Rule Base Clean-up & AlgoSec Analysis

• Traffic Flow Analysis & Resilient Design

• Change Pack Authoring & CAB Implementation

• Technical Standards Authorship in Financial Services

Diversity:

At Opticore IT we embrace diversity and are committed to equal opportunities. We actively recruit for an inclusive and diverse workforce and as such, want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel empowered to let us know if you require any adjustments to be made with your application or interview process so please speak to our recruitment team.