A.K.A. Tier 1 Network Support, Network Administrator or Network Architect.
Salary Range: $60-120k per year.
Network engineers are IT specialists who design, build and configure new network infrastructure and maintain and upgrade existing network systems—often traditional local area networks, wide area networks, wireless networks, and VPNs. They may also work with software-defined wide area networks, unified communication systems, and cloud networks. Smaller companies may employ one networking professional who serves as a network administrator, network engineer and network architect. However, network engineering jobs at mid-size and large organizations are often more specialized. A single engineer at an enterprise-level firm might focus exclusively on system design and upgrades, administration, network performance monitoring, virtualization, or hardware management.
A network engineer’s duties can include:
- Maintaining computer networks including mainframes, VPNs, routers and other physical hardware
- Installing and configuring network equipment
- Creating firewalls and updating virus protection software and data security systems to keep data and communications protected
- Monitoring computer systems to improve network performance for all systems
- Troubleshooting, resolving, and communicating networking issues to other employees and management
- Implementing disaster recovery procedures
- Maintaining current knowledge and understanding of security and networking best practices to offer the best solutions and protection to company systems
- Creating technology budgets
- Designing network layouts
- Overseeing capacity planning and scaling
- Integrating new technology into existing networks
- Planning scheduled upgrades
- Procuring network equipment
- Testing network capacity and functionality
- Working with equipment vendors and subcontractors
Sample Requirements & Training:
- Strong communication skills, problem-solving skills, and analytical skills.
- Skills related to standard network protocols:
- TCP/IP, DNS, and DHCP
- Switching and routing
- Firewalls and network security
- VPNs
- Wireless networking
