NEN Solution Engineering - Senior Network Engineer

Position Overview

We are seeking a seasoned, hands-on Senior Network Transport Solution Engineer to support the technical planning, architecture, design, integration, verification, validation, fielding, and sustainment of enterprise network transport solutions.

Reporting to the Engineering - Transport Access Lead, this position will serve as a senior individual contributor and may act as the technical lead for assigned projects, engineering workstreams, or solution-development efforts. The engineer will be responsible for entire projects or technical processes that may span multiple network technologies, infrastructure domains, operational environments, or engineering disciplines.

The engineer will develop solutions to complex technical issues that affect multiple systems or areas, applying advanced technical knowledge, ingenuity, and sound engineering judgment. Responsibilities will include requirements analysis, functional analysis, alternatives analysis, trade studies, interface definition, solution architecture, detailed design, laboratory validation, implementation planning, system testing, fielding, and transition to operations.

The engineer may coordinate technical activities, provide technical direction to personnel supporting an assigned project, review engineering products, and mentor less-experienced engineers. The position will not be responsible for employee performance management, staffing decisions, career development, or organizational workforce planning.

The successful candidate will remain actively engaged in hands-on network engineering and will work closely with Network Operations, Cybersecurity, Systems Engineering, program leadership, site personnel, customers, telecommunications carriers, equipment manufacturers, subcontractors, and other technical stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Project and Workstream Leadership

• Technical Execution: Lead the technical planning and execution of assigned network transport projects, workstreams, modernization efforts, technology refreshes, or engineering activities.

• Project Coordination: Coordinate engineering activities across multiple technical areas, sites, vendors, or infrastructure domains and identify dependencies that could affect successful delivery.

• Technical Direction: Provide technical guidance to engineers and other personnel assigned to an effort, review engineering work products, and help resolve issues that could affect cost, schedule, performance, security, or operational readiness.

• Requirements Traceability: Help ensure that engineering decisions, designs, test activities, and implementation plans remain traceable to approved technical and operational requirements.

• Risk Management: Identify technical risks, assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and lifecycle concerns and develop practical mitigation recommendations for project and engineering leadership.

• Estimating and Planning: Support the development of engineering estimates, bills of material, implementation schedules, staffing assumptions, technical proposals, and levels of effort.

• Technical Mentoring: Mentor and support other engineers through design reviews, peer reviews, troubleshooting activities, laboratory testing, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

2. Systems Engineering and Solution Lifecycle

• Requirements Analysis: Analyze operational, functional, technical, cybersecurity, performance, capacity, availability, interoperability, and supportability requirements for assigned network transport solutions.

• Functional Analysis: Evaluate how network transport capabilities support mission systems, applications, user communities, operational services, and dependent infrastructure.

• Alternatives and Trade Studies: Evaluate technical alternatives based on capability, cost, risk, lifecycle status, interoperability, implementation complexity, cybersecurity, maintainability, scalability, and supportability.

• Requirements Allocation: Translate customer and program requirements into system, subsystem, interface, configuration, performance, and testing requirements.

• Interface Definition: Define and document network interfaces, addressing requirements, routing boundaries, security-zone interactions, transport dependencies, management interfaces, and external service connections.

• Solution Documentation: Develop and maintain high-level designs, low-level designs, logical and physical network diagrams, bills of material, IP addressing plans, port maps, rack elevations, cable requirements, configuration templates, implementation procedures, rollback plans, test plans, and as-built documentation.

• Verification and Validation: Plan and perform laboratory validation, integration testing, interoperability testing, performance testing, failover testing, site-acceptance testing, and other activities needed to confirm that solutions satisfy defined requirements.

• Configuration and Quality Control: Apply established engineering, cybersecurity, configuration-management, change-management, and quality-assurance processes throughout the solution lifecycle.

• Operational Transition: Support the transition of new or modified solutions to operations by confirming that monitoring, documentation, training, support procedures, configuration backups, escalation paths, and operational dependencies have been addressed.

3. Network Transport Architecture and Design

• Enterprise Network Architecture: Design and integrate secure, scalable, resilient, and supportable network transport solutions across campus, data center, branch, remote-site, enterprise-edge, and wide-area network environments.

• LAN Engineering: Develop wired network designs incorporating access, distribution, and core architectures; Layer 2 and Layer 3 boundaries; VLANs; trunks; link aggregation; loop-prevention mechanisms; redundant uplinks; and resilient switching technologies.

• Routing Engineering: Design and implement IPv4 and IPv6 routing solutions using static routing and dynamic routing protocols such as OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, or IS-IS, as applicable to the environment.

• Route Control: Develop route-advertisement, redistribution, filtering, summarization, path-selection, route-policy, and convergence approaches that support stable and predictable network operation.

• WAN and SD-WAN Engineering: Design and integrate enterprise WAN, SD-WAN, VPN, MPLS, carrier Ethernet, internet, and other wide-area transport solutions.

• Data Center Networking: Support data center network designs, including leaf-spine architectures, Layer 2 and Layer 3 interconnection, multi-chassis redundancy, workload connectivity, network overlays, and technologies such as EVPN and VXLAN where applicable.

• Network Segmentation: Develop technical solutions using VLANs, VRFs, routed boundaries, access controls, overlays, and other segmentation mechanisms to separate systems, missions, tenants, security zones, or operational functions.

• Carrier and Optical Transport: Evaluate and integrate telecommunications carrier services, leased circuits, dark fiber, wavelength services, metro Ethernet, broadband, and other optical or packet-based transport services.

• Out-of-Band Management: Develop resilient out-of-band management and console-access solutions that support remote administration, troubleshooting, and recovery during primary network outages.

• Quality of Service: Design and validate end-to-end QoS solutions, including traffic classification, DSCP and Layer 2 Class of Service marking, trust boundaries, queuing, shaping, policing, congestion management, and bandwidth allocation.

• Multicast Transport: Develop multicast-routing and distribution solutions using technologies such as IGMP, PIM, rendezvous-point architectures, and related controls when required by supported systems.

• Availability and Resiliency: Develop technical requirements and designs for high availability, path diversity, equipment redundancy, geographic redundancy,