Principal Support Engineer - Network
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Principal Support Engineer — Network ========================================
DOMAIN SUBJECT-MATTER EXPERT · ESCALATION & ENABLEMENT
About the role
Reach Security tells organizations what their existing security tools should be doing with the products they already own — and proves it. As a Principal Support Engineer, Network, you are Reach's senior domain authority on everything network.
This is not a firewall-administration or network break/fix role. You won't spend your days writing rule-bases, managing devices, or running a customer's network operations. You've already done that work — for years — and that is exactly what qualifies you. Those years in the trenches are what let you look at a customer's network rules, their controls, and Reach's findings and say, with authority, what matters, what doesn't, and why.
In this role you put that hard-won judgment to work: advising the field, guiding customers through their hardest problems, sharpening Reach's recommendations, and troubleshooting how Reach integrates with the network-security products already in a customer's environment. It is a high-agency individual-contributor role for a proven expert who is energized by unfamiliar problems rather than thrown by them.
What this role really does
You'll serve three audiences at once, and the strongest people in this seat move fluidly between them:
- Enable the field (Sales Engineering & POVs). Help SEs build the strongest possible POV from Reach's network findings — turning a rule-base analysis or exposure finding into “here's the risk this creates, here's why it's urgent, here's what to change first.” Coach the field to defend those findings against a skeptical network team, and tell Engineering and Research what would make the next network POV even more compelling.
- Empower Customer Success. Be the deep technical resolver behind CS. When a customer hits a hard network or firewall-integration problem, you investigate to root cause, propose the fix, and hand Engineering a clean, reproducible diagnosis — so engineers validate and ship rather than doing front-line discovery.
- Harden the product. Own your share of the escalation queue and close the loop: solve, reproduce, test, document, and enable — so each issue makes Reach more robust and each runbook makes the whole team faster.
How you'll spend your time
- Serve as the network subject-matter expert for the support team — review customer firewall rule-bases, network policies, segmentation, and controls, and make sage, prioritized recommendations grounded in real-world best practice (overly permissive, shadowed, redundant, or risky rules; exposure; segmentation gaps).
- Critique Reach's network findings so customers are presented only with what truly matters — separating signal from noise and articulating why a finding is urgent, or why it isn't.
- Troubleshoot integrations between Reach and third-party network-security products (NGFW, IDS/IPS/NDR, proxy/SWG, SASE/ZTNA, and similar) — using your deep knowledge of how those platforms actually behave to pinpoint where an integration breaks and propose the fix. This is where your hands-on background is exercised most directly.
- Diagnose deep, engineering-level customer issues end to end — reasoning from packet captures, flow data, device logs, and protocol behavior to reach true root cause, then packaging a clear diagnosis and proposed fix that Engineering can act on quickly.
- Uplevel the Sales Engineering team — teach the technical field team to read and explain network findings, defend recommendations to customer network and security teams, and translate product output into what actually matters to the customer.
- Partner with Engineering and QA to report defects, validate fixes, confirm workarounds, and drive root-cause analysis.
- Author and maintain runbooks, audit playbooks, and internal documentation that turn your field experience into repeatable team knowledge.
- Maintain enough of a lab or test capability across representative network platforms to validate hypotheses about behavior and integration edge cases.
The experience that qualifies you
The experience below is the foundation we're hiring for. You've done this work hands-on, at depth, earlier in your career — and in this role you'll leverage that judgment as a subject-matter expert rather than performing it day to day. We're screening for the expertise that experience produced, not for a desire to keep administering networks.
- 6+ years of deep, hands-on experience with enterprise network security — firewalls, segmentation, and network traffic analysis — enough to have developed genuine expertise, not passing familiarity.
- Time in a senior individual-contributor role such as L3 Network Support Engineer, Network Security Engineer, Firewall Engineer, or Security Support Engineer.
- Platform-level expertise with one or more enterprise firewall ecosystems — Palo Alto (PAN-OS), Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco (ASA/Firepower), Check Point, or Juniper — including rule-base design, review, and optimization, and the judgment to know what “good” looks like.
- Strong command of TCP/IP and network protocol internals, with the ability to reason from packet captures (Wireshark/tcpdump), flow/telemetry data, and device logs to root cause.
- Depth in network segmentation and micro-segmentation, NAT, routing (BGP/OSPF), VPN (IPsec/SSL), and TLS/SSL inspection.
- Experience with IDS/IPS/NDR, secure web gateways/proxies, DNS security, and modern SASE/ZTNA architectures.
- Cloud network security experience — AWS security groups/NACLs, Azure NSGs, GCP firewall rules, VPCs, and connectivity/peering constructs.
- A track record resolving interoperability issues between network-security tools and the broader stack.
- Working knowledge of Linux system administration, sufficient to reason about the services that collect from and integrate with network devices.
- Experience with enterprise-scale, multi-site environments and large, heterogeneous network estates.
- The advisory instinct that defines this role: the ability to look at a rule-base or a set of findings and tell a customer, clearly, which few things matter and why.
- Strong written and verbal communication — you can make a complex network issue clear to a customer, an SE, and an engineer, each in their own language.
- Strong time management and a real sense of urgency in customer-impacting situations.
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, Networking, or a related technical discipline — or equivalent practical experience.
Cross-domain fluency we value
Reach spans the whole security stack, and the best domain experts are curious well past their specialty. You don't need to be an expert in all of these, but comfort in several will make you far stronger here: identity and IDP troubleshooting (SSO, SAML/OIDC, and layered/conditional access as it intersects network controls); a working grasp of threats and vulnerabilities and how they map to exposure at the network layer; and familiarity with email security controls. We'll gladly help you deepen the areas you're newer to.
Nice to have
- Relevant certifications (e.g., PCNSE, NSE, CCNP/CCIE Security, CISSP) — valued as evidence of depth, not required.
- Experience with WAF, load balancers, and application-layer security.
- Familiarity with network detection/analytics, SIEM, or SOAR platforms from a support or troubleshooting perspective.
- Scripting/automation for network validation and troubleshooting (Python, or platform APIs).
- Exposure to hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity (transit gateways, SD-WAN, cloud firewalls).
Who you'll thrive as
You're the person peers escalate to — and still the first to say “that's a strange packet, let me chase it down.” You think in systems, you're relentless about root cause, and you're generous with what you learn. You're as comfortable teaching an SE how to defend a rule-base finding as you are staring at a capture until the anomaly gives itself up. Curiosity, adaptability, and low ego matter to us as much as depth: the security stack keeps changing, and we're looking for someone who's genuinely excited by that.
Working at Reach Security:
- Competitive salary, and equity package
- Comprehensive benefits package including:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including plan options with company-paid employee coverage
- FSA, HSA, and 401(k) plans
- Company paid life insurance and disability coverage, along with buy up options
- Voluntary benefits including pet insurance, identify theft coverage, and legal services
- Unlimited PTO and sick time
About Reach Security
Reach Security is the defensive posture management company helping organizations deliver.