Senior Network and Security Engineer

Company Description

CNS is a technology company that powers the future by providing digital solutions essential to support all enterprise and human development. While growing and managing a robust pool of supplier-partners for the benefit of our clients has always been a priority, we are constantly re-inventing ourselves.
Founded in 1987 with more than 35 years of experience, CNS employs over 320 employees including more than 250 certified engineers. We offer in-depth expertise and a range of best-in-class products that support the digital transformation of all major industries. With offices in three countries, we have an extensive reach into, and regional knowledge of the Middle East markets.

Job Description

Design, deploy and hand over enterprise security and data-centre projects for CNS customers across the UAE. The role is hands-on: the engineer leads implementations end to end - Next-Gen Firewalls, Zero Trust, NAC, F5 application delivery and Cisco ACI - and acts as the technical escalation point for the team.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES:

Design and architecture

• Gather customer requirements and produce High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD) documents for security and data-centre solutions.
• Design segmentation, firewall policy, Zero Trust access and NAC policy models aligned with customer security standards.
• Review existing customer environments and recommend hardening, migration and consolidation paths.

Deployment and migration

• Lead end-to-end deployments: staging, configuration, integration, cut-over and post-go-live support.
• Plan and execute firewall and load-balancer migrations (policy conversion, rule clean-up, rollback plans) with minimal downtime.
• Integrate security platforms with AD/LDAP, RADIUS/TACACS+, PKI, SIEM and SOAR.
• Write and run User Acceptance Test (UAT) plans and deliver as-built documentation and knowledge transfer to customers.

Operations and support

• Act as L3 escalation for network and security incidents; lead root-cause analysis for major incidents.
• Carry out preventive maintenance (PM) health checks, firmware upgrades and vulnerability remediation within agreed maintenance windows.
• Meet SLA targets on assigned tickets and keep ticketing tools up to date.

Team and customer delivery

• Support pre-sales with solution sizing, BoQ review, SOW and RFP technical responses.
• Present technical status to customer stakeholders and internal management.

Qualifications

Education:

Minimum :

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Telecom Engineering or IT (or equivalent experience).
• At least one of: CCNP Security or CCNP Enterprise / Data Center; PCNSE; Fortinet NSE 7 / FCSS; F5 Certified Technology Specialist (301/302/303).

Desired:

• CCIE Security / Data Center / Enterprise.
• Cisco ISE or ACI specialist certification.

Experience:

Minimum:

• Minimum 10 years in enterprise networking, including 5+ years delivering network security projects.

Desired:

• System integrator or managed-services experience in the UAE/GCC.
• Hands-on delivery of multi-vendor firewall and F5 migrations.

Additional Information

Skills & Abilities:

Minimum:

• Next-Gen Firewall - Palo Alto, FortiGate, Cisco FTD/FMC: HA deployments, policy migration, IPS, URL filtering, SSL decryption, VPN.
• Fortinet Security Fabric - FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiEMS, FortiZTP, FortiSandbox, FortiADC, FortiMail.
• Zero Trust / ZTNA / SASE - ZTNA rollouts replacing legacy VPN; IdP integration (Entra ID, Okta) and MFA.
• Network Access Control - Cisco ISE, Aruba ClearPass, FortiNAC: 802.1X, MAB, guest/BYOD, posture, profiling, TrustSec.
• Application delivery - F5 BIG-IP LTM, GTM, Advanced WAF, APM; F5OS / rSeries / VELOS.
• Data-centre fabric - Cisco ACI (APIC), Nexus 9000: fabric bring-up, tenants/VRF/BD/EPG, L3Out, service graphs.
• Layer 2 / Layer 3 - VLANs, STP, LACP, vPC; BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, VRF, HSRP/VRRP, VXLAN EVPN.
• Zero-touch SD-WAN - Fortinet SD-WAN (FortiZTP + FortiManager) large-scale branch rollouts.

Desired:

• Security operations - SIEM (Splunk, QRadar), EDR, vulnerability scanners, CIS hardening.
• Automation - Python, Ansible, REST APIs, Terraform for bulk configuration and policy migration.
• Clear written English for HLD/LLD, method statements, change requests and customer reports.
• Valid UAE driving licence; willing to work maintenance windows and join an on-call rota.

Compliance with policies and procedures based on the ISO standards adopted by CNS.