Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP)

The Work

What Success Looks Like

• Incidents get resolved without a second escalation to establish who owns the problem.
• Recurring failures get traced to a root cause and closed, rather than reset and re-reported a week later.
• You can tell a non-technical operator what happened and when it will be fixed, in terms they can act on.
• Changes you make hold up under continuous operational load, not just in the maintenance window.

• Refresh and redesign work lands inside approved windows and does not run past them.
• Designs account for the sites that are hardest to reach and hardest to take down, not only the convenient ones.
• Capacity and transport decisions get made before a site outgrows them, rather than after users start complaining.
• Rollback paths exist and have been tested before a cutover begins, not drafted during one.

• Someone who was not present for a change can understand what was done and why.
• Diagrams and configuration records match what is actually deployed.
• Where a standard exists, it is written down. Where one does not, that gap is visible rather than tribal knowledge.
• Troubleshooting knowledge ends up somewhere searchable rather than staying in your head.

Where You'd Fit

• Network Specialist. You execute changes and work incidents inside established standards. You know which problems are yours to solve and which need to go up, and you escalate before a small issue becomes an outage.
• Network Engineer. You own a segment, a site group, or a system. You make routine design calls yourself and bring the consequential ones to review.
• Senior Network Engineer. You take the problems that arrive without a clear answer.
• Other engineers check their approach with you before they commit to it, and you are usually the one who figures out why the intermittent fault is not intermittent.
• Senior Network Architect. You set the design that others build against, and you are accountable when that design meets an operational reality it did not anticipate.
• Lead Network Architect. You own whether the environment holds together as a whole, including the parts you did not design and the decisions you inherited.

What You Bring

• Active Industry certifications, such as CCNA, CCNP (routing and switching)
• Nice to have: experience and expertise with Zero Trust (Zscaler) and Palo Alto technologies
• Previous experience CBP highly desired, followed by DHS or DoW
• Advance skills in 3 or more of the following:
  • Cisco SD-WAN
  • Cisco Hyperflex
  • Cisco StealthWatch
  • Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
  • Cisco Firepower
• Willing to be cross trained in the above technologies, 
• You have kept a distributed network running where downtime had consequences beyond user frustration.
• You have modernized live infrastructure under change control, not only built new environments.
• You have worked at remote or austere sites and can describe what you did differently because of it.
• You have operated in mixed-vendor environments and are not dependent on one vendor's tooling.
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
• You can work inside federal change management and accreditation without treating it as an obstacle.
• Certifications such as CCNP, CCIE, or JNCIP are useful but not a substitute for having done the work.

A note on timing

Employee Benefits