About Us:

PUNCH Cyber Analytics Group (PUNCH) is a Virginia-based, small business founded in 2012 operating as a cohesive team that incorporates the sum of our group’s diverse skills, talents, and resources toward our collective passion: advancing data analytics to impact cyber operations. PUNCH is a two-time Inc. Magazine ‘Best Workplaces’ awardee offering unique benefits and personal touches to provide a positive work-life experience for our team. PUNCH brings unique qualifications, resources, and past-performance that make us suitable to address the goals of our diverse customer-base. Further, we have past and current experience supporting cyber operations and cyber ML-based research, with well over 100 years of collective experience from our collaborative, multi-disciplinary team.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the organization’s Zero Trust security architecture and strategy aligned with business and security objectives.
• Provide recommendations regarding the Agency's perimeter UTM devices IAW NIST 800-53 and industry best practices for Cisco, Juniper, Riverbed, and Fortinate.
• Develop Zero Trust roadmaps, maturity models, and implementation plans across people, processes, applications, data, devices, and infrastructure.
• Establish identity-centric security controls, including strong authentication, MFA, SSO, identity governance, and least-privilege access.
• Design network segmentation and micro-segmentation to limit lateral movement and reduce attack surfaces.
• Implement continuous verification of users, devices, workloads, applications, and network connections rather than relying on implicit trust.
• Define policy-based access controls using identity, device posture, risk, location, application, and behavioral signals.
• Establish device trust and endpoint security requirements, including device compliance, health checks, encryption, patching, and EDR coverage.
• Develop data-centric security controls, including data classification, encryption, DLP, access governance, and rights management.
• Define security telemetry and continuous monitoring requirements to support real-time risk-based access decisions.
• Integrate Zero Trust controls with cloud, hybrid-cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments.
• Assess existing infrastructure against Zero Trust maturity frameworks and reference architectures, such as NIST Zero Trust Architecture.
• Identify security gaps, vulnerabilities, architectural risks, and legacy dependencies that prevent Zero Trust adoption.
• Create architecture standards, patterns, reference designs, and security requirements for engineering and project teams.
• Continuously evolve the architecture based on new threats, technologies, business requirements, and emerging Zero Trust capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications:

To be considered for this position, you must minimally meet the knowledge, skills, and abilities listed below:

• 7 years of experience with a bachelor’s degree or 9 years of total experience.
• Ability to work in both an individual and team environment.
• Flexibility to support after hours maintenance activities.
• Must be able to obtain a Position of Public Trust.