Principal Security Engineer - Reliability

Why This Role Matters

In this role, you will help shape the strategy for critical network security products at enterprise scale. You will influence how security platforms are engineered, governed, automated, monitored, and continuously improved while partnering across cybersecurity, infrastructure, cloud, application, architecture, risk, compliance, and business teams. This is an opportunity to modernize security product delivery, reduce operational and cyber risk, and improve the stability and effectiveness of platforms that protect critical business services.

Role Details

• Employment Type: Full time
• Role Type: Individual contributor; this is not a people-manager role.
• Work Model: Hybrid work model with three days per week in the office.
• Eligible Locations: Dallas, TX metro; Charlotte, NC metro; or Chandler, AZ metro.
• Escalation Expectations: Provides senior technical escalation for critical incidents and high-risk changes. This role is expected to support critical incident response as needed; any recurring on-call rotation will be clearly defined before offer acceptance.
• Travel Expectations: 5% or less.

Core Technology Stack

This role focuses on enterprise network security products and services, including next-generation firewalls and firewall management platforms, secure web proxy and secure internet access, network access control (NAC), identity-aware access, web application firewall (WAF), application protection, secure remote access, ZTNA, SASE, network segmentation and micro-segmentation, threat prevention, intrusion prevention, inspection, TLS/SSL inspection, encrypted traffic analysis, logging, telemetry, monitoring, observability platforms, automation, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code tooling.

Key Responsibilities

You will provide senior technical leadership, hands-on engineering guidance, and cross-functional influence across the following areas:

• Network Security Product Strategy: Define and drive reliability, security posture, policy governance, service health indicators, risk measures, and improvement plans for security platforms.
• Security Platform Engineering: Guide engineering decisions for proxy, firewall, NAC, WAF, secure access, and segmentation platforms to improve scalability, resiliency, and operational simplicity.
• Policy and Control Maturity: Strengthen firewall rules, proxy policies, NAC/WAF controls, segmentation models, exception handling, certification practices, and compliance-aligned controls.
• Incident Leadership: Lead major incident response and service restoration for security product incidents, and drive root cause analysis and prevention of repeat issues.
• Automation and Observability: Expand telemetry, alerting, service health reporting, policy validation, configuration management, automated testing, and self-service capabilities.
• Architecture Influence: Review and guide designs to improve security effectiveness, failure isolation, availability, inspection performance, and operational readiness.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with cybersecurity, network, cloud, infrastructure, application, architecture, risk, and compliance teams while mentoring engineers and influencing senior stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

You should demonstrate principal-level technical depth, operational judgment, and cross-functional influence, including:

• 7+ years of experience in network security, network engineering, or security infrastructure supporting business-critical enterprise network services.
• 5 plus years of expert knowledge of network security platforms including firewalls, proxy, NAC, WAF, ZTNA, segmentation, and secure access.
• 5 plus years experience with a strong understanding of TCP/IP, routing, switching, DNS, load balancing, TLS/SSL, and application-layer protocols.
• 5 plus years experience applying reliability or SRE practices to infrastructure or security platforms, including service health measurement, problem management, operational health metrics, and continuous improvement.
• 5 plus years experience improving operational stability and reducing repeat incidents through root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, corrective action planning, systemic remediation, and measurable recurrence prevention.
• 5 plus years experience owning corrective actions from post-incident review through implementation, validation, and closure.
• 5 plus years experience improving change success rates through risk assessment, peer review, validation testing, rollback planning, and post-change verification.
• 5 plus years experience conducting operational readiness reviews, production readiness assessments, failure-mode reviews, or service acceptance reviews.
• 5 plus years experience managing vendor escalations, product defects, support cases, and platform lifecycle risks that impact service stability.
• 5 plus years experience improving security control effectiveness, audit readiness, exception governance, and policy compliance across network security platforms.
• 5 plus years experience with hands-on automation or scripting experience with tools such as Python, Ansible, Terraform, APIs, or equivalent technologies.
• 5 plus years experience improving monitoring, telemetry, logging, and service health visibility.

Preferred Qualifications

The following qualifications are beneficial and will help a candidate be successful in this role:

• Experience influencing enterprise network security architecture and standards.
• Strong leadership, communication, mentoring, and stakeholder influence skills.
• Relevant certifications such as PCNSE, CCNP Security, Fortinet NSE, CISSP, AWS/Azure security, ITIL, or equivalent credentials.
• Ability to prioritize reliability improvements based on business impact, operational risk, service criticality, control effectiveness, and incident trends
• Proven ability to lead complex incident response, troubleshoot high-impact issues under pressure, restore service, and communicate clearly to stakeholders.
• Deep expertise in one or more domains including proxy, firewall, NAC, WAF, or secure access.
• Experience with firewall rule lifecycle, policy hygiene, segmentation, and least-privilege models.
• Experience tuning WAF policies, reducing false positives, and protecting public applications.
• Experience designing NAC policies, identity integration, and zero trust access models.
• Experience with network security modernization, cloud security connectivity, or SASE/ZTNA transformation.
• Experience in regulated or critical industries such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, or similar environments.
• Experience reading and interpreting packet captures, proxy logs, firewall logs, WAF events, and NAC telemetry.
• Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Network Engineering, or a related field.

Indicators of Success

Success in this role is measured by stronger security platform reliability, improved control maturity, and reduced risk:

• Improved availability, stability, MTTD, MTTR, and incident trends for security services.
• Reduced repeat incidents, policy errors, and control gaps.
• Stronger policy hygiene and governance across firewall, proxy, NAC, and WAF.
• Increased automation and reduced manual operational toil.
• Broader adoption of security standards, design patterns, and operational playbooks.
• Increased stakeholder confidence in security platform stability, effectiveness, and change readiness.

Job Expectations

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

This role is not eligible for Visa Sponsorship

This is a hybrid role 3 days in office 2 days remote

This position is not available for visa sponsorship

Pay Range

Reflected is the base pay range offered for this position. Pay may vary depending on factors including but not limited to demonstrated examples of prior performance, skills, experience, or work location. Employees may also be eligible for incentive opportunities. $159,000.00 - $305,000.00

Posting End Date:

15 Nov 2026

Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

We Value Equal Opportunity

Wells Fargo is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Employees support our focus on building strong customer relationships balanced with a strong risk mitigating and compliance-driven culture which firmly establishes those disciplines as critical to the success of our customers and company. They are accountable for execution of all applicable risk programs (Credit, Market, Financial Crimes, Operational, Regulatory Compliance), which includes effectively following and adhering to applicable Wells Fargo policies and procedures, appropriately fulfilling risk and compliance obligations, timely and effective escalation and remediation of issues, and making sound risk decisions. There is emphasis on proactive monitoring, governance, risk identification and escalation, as well as making sound risk decisions commensurate with the business unit’s risk appetite and all risk and compliance program requirements.

Applicants with Disabilities

To request a medical accommodation during the application or interview process, visit Disability Inclusion at Wells Fargo.

Drug and Alcohol Policy

Wells Fargo maintains a drug free workplace.  Please see our Drug and Alcohol Policy to learn more.

Wells Fargo Recruitment and Hiring Requirements:

a. Third-Party recordings are prohibited unless authorized by Wells Fargo.

b. Wells Fargo requires you to directly represent your own experiences during the recruiting and hiring process.

c. Please be prepared to provide accurate information and supporting documentation in connection with any lawful employment and education verification conducted by Wells Fargo.