Principal Cybersecurity Engineer – Firewall Platforms: Firewall Policy with Operational Artificial Intelligence (AI) at AT&T
Alpharetta, GA
$155,400–$261,100from the description
Jul 24, 2026
Alpharetta, GA
Jul 26, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A deeply technical, hands-on engineering role focused on managing and operating enterprise firewall platforms at large scale, primarily within Palo Alto environments. Day-to-day work covers the full firewall policy lifecycle — creation, tuning, troubleshooting, and decommissioning — alongside change management, on-call support, and cross-team incident resolution. The role also involves driving automation and AI-assisted workflows to improve operational efficiency. Suited to seasoned network security engineers with 8+ years of enterprise firewall operations experience.
Senior level · 8+ years · Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $136,548 (middle half $105,715–$165,838). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The role is posted across five locations (Alpharetta GA, Bothell WA, Dallas TX, Middletown NJ, Charlotte NC); Dallas-Fort Worth is used as the primary CBSA since AT&T's corporate headquarters is there, but the compensation range applies to all listed sites.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role's primary day-to-day work is operating and managing firewall platforms (closer to 15-1244 infrastructure operations), but the framing under AT&T's Chief Security Office, the security-policy analysis focus, and the threat/compliance posture tilt it toward 15-1212 Information Security Analysts. 15-1244 is noted as the runner-up.
The title says 'Principal' but the actual scope — owning a single firewall platform domain within a large enterprise, with 8+ years required — is consistent with a Senior individual contributor, not an org-wide technical authority. Seniority is set to Senior accordingly.
The Bachelor's degree is stated as 'desired,' not required, and the Education section says '7+ years of related experience' as an alternative path, so the degree requirement is set to None.
Palo Alto CLI policy automation and 'policy as code' with Python scripting appear under Preferred Qualifications, so Python is marked preferred.
The firewall constructs (App-ID, User-ID, Content-ID, NAT) are explicitly called out in the Required Qualifications section as technical knowledge the candidate must demonstrate; they are marked required.
AlgoSec, WildFire, Threat Prevention, DNS Security, URL Filtering, SSL decryption, ServiceNow, CI/CD, BGP, OSPF, IPsec, and AIOps all appear exclusively under Preferred Qualifications and are marked preferred.
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): firewall policy lifecycle management, packet capture analysis.
Read the full posting
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