WAN Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a WAN Engineer based in the United States.

We are seeking an experienced Wide Area Network (WAN) Engineer to support the reliability, security, and performance of enterprise network infrastructure in a federal government environment. In this role, you will design, maintain, troubleshoot, and optimize network connectivity across geographically distributed facilities, data centers, cloud environments, and remote locations. You will work with Cisco technologies, routing and switching protocols, telecommunications circuits, and network monitoring platforms to maintain critical services. Collaborating with network operations, security, cloud engineering teams, vendors, and federal stakeholders, you will help resolve complex incidents and strengthen network resilience. This position also contributes to infrastructure modernization, security compliance, and continuous service improvement. The role is primarily remote, with local candidates near Suitland, Maryland, also welcome.

Accountabilities

As a WAN Engineer, you will oversee enterprise network operations, resolve technical challenges, and help ensure uninterrupted connectivity across mission-critical environments. You will also support infrastructure improvements, change management, security initiatives, and collaboration across technical teams.

• Configure, maintain, troubleshoot, and optimize enterprise WAN infrastructure, including routers, switches, and telecommunications circuits.

• Support connectivity across headquarters, regional facilities, data centers, cloud environments, and remote locations.

• Monitor network availability, performance, bandwidth utilization, latency, and packet loss to identify and address service degradation proactively.

• Maintain and troubleshoot MPLS, Ethernet circuits, VPNs, SD-WAN, and dedicated point-to-point connections.

• Support Cisco network infrastructure, including IOS and IOS-XE platforms.

• Implement network configuration changes, firmware upgrades, hardware replacements, and infrastructure improvements.

• Maintain network redundancy, high availability, failover, and disaster recovery capabilities.

• Act as a technical escalation resource for complex network incidents and service disruptions.

• Diagnose and resolve routing, switching, circuit connectivity, and network performance issues.

• Coordinate troubleshooting and service restoration with telecommunications carriers, equipment manufacturers, and internal technical teams.

• Participate in incident bridges, outage investigations, and root cause analysis, contributing to After Action Reports and technical updates for management and stakeholders.

• Validate network functionality following planned maintenance, emergency changes, and service restoration.

• Develop and execute network changes in accordance with Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Change Control Board (CCB) procedures.

• Prepare change implementation plans, impact assessments, validation procedures, and rollback documentation.

• Support vulnerability remediation, network hardening, and compliance activities aligned with federal security requirements.

• Use monitoring and diagnostic platforms such as SolarWinds, Datadog, and ExtraHop to assess network health and troubleshoot issues.

• Maintain accurate network topology diagrams, circuit inventories, device configurations, and infrastructure documentation.

• Document incidents, troubleshooting activities, and resolutions in ServiceNow or equivalent IT service management platforms.

• Contribute to capacity planning, network lifecycle management, and infrastructure modernization initiatives.

• Identify end-of-life and end-of-support equipment and recommend replacement or remediation strategies.

• Collaborate with NOC personnel, Network Security, Systems Engineering, Cloud Engineering, telecommunications providers, and federal stakeholders.

• Support infrastructure migrations, data center transitions, technical reviews, and enterprise network modernization projects.

• Participate in after-hours maintenance windows and on-call rotations, responding to critical incidents and operational escalations as required.

Requirements

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on enterprise networking experience, particularly with Cisco technologies and WAN connectivity. You should be comfortable managing complex technical incidents, following structured IT service management processes, and communicating effectively in a mission-critical operational environment.

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Network Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.

• At least 5 years of hands-on experience supporting enterprise WAN and network infrastructure.

• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, routing, switching, and enterprise network architecture.

• Demonstrated…