Network Engineer

SAIC is hiring a Network Engineer to help engineer and operate a classified enterprise network that reaches diplomatic posts in nearly every country on earth. Every encrypted circuit, every router at a remote post, and every piece of transport in between is part of one system — and you will help keep it running and make it better.
What makes this different from commercial network engineering is the operating constraint. You cannot drive to the site. When a post goes down you are working through local staff across a dozen time zones, often over a constrained or satellite circuit, sometimes with no out-of-band path because the path you would use is the one that failed. Engineers who are good at this are good at reasoning from incomplete information and getting it right the first time, because there may not be a second attempt that day.

This role may require occasional international travel.  

What You Will Do:

• Engineer and operate securing routing, switching, and transport across a worldwide classified network, including the encrypted transport layer and the in-line network encryptors that protect it.
• Troubleshoot complex faults end to end — distinguishing circuit, transport, encryption, routing, and device causes — and restore service to posts under operational time pressure.
• Provide Tier II and Tier III escalation support for incidents the service desk cannot resolve, including an on-call rotation that covers every time zone the mission operates in.
• Design and implement network changes through formal configuration control, with the test, back-out plan, and post-change verification done before the window opens rather than improvised inside it.
• Engineer post network architectures, including site surveys, equipment refresh, bandwidth and capacity planning, and the design compromises that constrained circuits force.
• Implement  access control to sensitive network devices, and hardening standards, and remediate scan and assessment findings within the accreditation timelines.
• Operate network monitoring, performance management, and configuration compliance tooling so that problems surface before a post reports them.
• Document designs, configurations, and runbooks to a standard that lets the next engineer sustain what you built without calling you.

Why This Role:
Few networks in the world have this footprint, and almost none carry this consequence. The work is visible: when it is right, people in hard places can communicate securely, and when it is not, they cannot. You will see the whole system rather than one layer of it, and the environment is modernizing — encrypted transport, cryptographic modernization, and network assurance tooling are all in motion, not sitting on a roadmap.
 

Required Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline and five years of enterprise network engineering experience. Four additional years of relevant experience may substitute for the degree.

• Working knowledge of routing and switching fundamentals — BGP, OSPF, VLANs, and the ability to reason about convergence and failure behavior in a large topology, not just configure it.

• Working knowledge of  WAN: VPN and tunneling, QoS, circuit troubleshooting, and working with carriers and transport providers.

• Firewall and network security experience, including ACL and policy design.

• The ability to read a packet capture and reason from it when the symptom and the cause are not in the same place.

• CCNP-level knowledge or equivalent demonstrated experience.

• DoD 8140 / 8570 IAT Level II certification (for example Security+ CE), current.

• Willingness to take on-call rotation, support off-hours maintenance windows aligned to overseas time zones, and travel occasionally in support of post work.

Required Clearance:

• U.S. citizenship

• Active TOP SECRET clearance with SCI eligibility, and the ability to obtain cryptographic access authorization. 

Nice to Have:

• Experience with HAIPE-compliant inline network encryptors or other Type 1 encryption in an operational network.
• Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) architecture experience.
• Satellite, low-bandwidth, or high-latency circuit engineering — and the instinct for what breaks on them that does not break on fiber.
• Department of State or other federal overseas post experience.
• SD-WAN, network automation, or infrastructure-as-code for network configuration.
• Network assurance and modeling tools, enterprise monitoring platforms, and ServiceNow ITSM and CMDB.
• CCIE, or vendor certification on the deployed platform.