Network Engineer

The City of Kirkland is seeking a skilled Network Engineer with CCNA-level expertise to join our Information Technology team. The ideal candidate is a collaborative team player and a motivated self-starter who is eager to learn quickly and contribute to a dynamic environment. Strong, hands-on experience with Cisco routers and switches is essential. Experience with Palo Alto firewalls is highly preferred, and a current CCNA certification is highly desirable.

This role is an excellent opportunity for a driven network professional looking to grow, innovate, and support critical citywide infrastructure.

The Network Engineer is responsible for the architecture, design, analysis, function, fitness for purpose, and daily operation of the network, inclusive of the physical and logical layers of the network, the wide area and local networking, the interface between City Network and cloud services, and the operational level of regional partnerships related to networking.

This position is also responsible for ensuring security and compliance based on industry requirements and best practices, including developing and implementing firewall rules and policies that safeguard the City’s network. The Senior Network Engineer is a primary point of contact for the City’s fiber optic network.

The Network Engineer is the journey-level position in the job series and works with guidance from the Senior Network Engineer. This position differs from the Senior Network Engineer, which is a technical expert and is the primary point of contact for the City’s fiber optic network.

Essential functions, as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act, may include any of the following representative duties, knowledge, and skills. This is not a comprehensive listing of all functions and duties performed by incumbents of this class; employees may be assigned duties which are not listed below; reasonable accommodations will be made as required. The job description does not constitute an employment agreement and is subject to change at any time by the employer.

Essential duties and responsibilities may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• With guidance from the Senior Network Engineer, designs, engineers, implements, and documents strategies for the City’s data centers (on-premises, cloud, hybrid), and remote connectivity. This includes designing and maintaining secure WAN/LAN, public/private network, and fiber connectivity in the city.
• Supports the lifecycle replacement of network infrastructure including routers, switches, firewalls, wireless networking, industrial ethernet, and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). Defines network standards and ensures compliance across systems.
• Proactively manages and monitors performance and capacity of the network, virtual infrastructure, cloud services, storage and applications supported by the Network & Operations Division. With guidance from the Senior Network Engineer, designs, costs, and recommends upgrades and changes to maintain adequate performance and capacity to meet growing business needs, while lowing latency and increasing reliability and redundancy. Includes proactively working with vendors for ongoing repairs and maintenance costs.
• Ensures secure access to the City’s network by proactively maintaining the City’s firewalls and remote connectivity solutions, while enforcing the necessary connectivity protocols. Support the deployment, integration, configuration and ongoing support and maintenance of network security-related solutions.
• Maintains up-to-date baselines for the secure configuration and operations of all network devices, either directly controlled or indirectly supported on the City’s network.
• Manages…