Network Specialist

Position: NETWORK SPECIALIST
** Job Description
**** Position

Purpose:

** As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills, and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world. UW is Committed to attracting and retaining a diverse staff, your experiences, perspectives, and unique identities will be honored at the University of Washington.

Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable, and welcoming.

UW Information Technology (UWIT) is the central information technology organization for the University of Washington, responsible for strategic planning, oversight, and direction of the UW’s IT infrastructure, resources, and services. UW-IT provides critical technology support to all three campuses, UW Medicine, and research operations around the world. UW-IT partners with the UW community to enable innovation, learning, discovery, and service.

The Network Engineer is an advanced, non-supervisory engineering role that bridges Network Implementation and Network Operations responsibilities into explicit engineering ownership. This position translates established network architecture and standards into deployable designs and configurations, leads medium-complexity deployments and changes, and provides escalation support for incidents impacting the wired network service.

This role is intentionally structured as a progression step for staff moving from installation/implementation-focused work toward full Network Engineering responsibilities. The incumbent demonstrates growing technical breadth, independent judgment within standards, and accountability for outcomes across the Design / Build / Deploy lifecycle.
** Position Complexities:
** This position operates in a complex, high-availability environment supporting diverse academic, clinical, and research stakeholders across multiple sites and operational contexts. Work regularly involves non-routine technical challenges where requirements may be incomplete, timelines constrained, and risk must be actively managed. The role applies independent judgment within established architecture and standards to plan and execute complex network changes, coordinate cross-functional deployment activities, and ensure successful stabilization and transition to steady-state operations.

Complexity is driven by:
* Ambiguity and engineering judgment: translating customer and operational requirements into a viable design/configuration approach within standards; evaluating tradeoffs and documenting decisions.
* Change risk and operational impact: planning, sequencing, and executing changes with rollback strategies; minimizing downtime and coordinating maintenance windows.
* Cross-team coordination: leading technical coordination across engineering, NIM-dispatch (field deployment), the NOC, and campus/clinical partners to deliver end-to-end outcomes.
* Competing priorities: balancing incident support, project delivery, and technical debt reduction while maintaining service reliability expectations.
* Accountability for outcomes: owning technical quality (configuration intent, validation, documentation/as-builts, and post-change stabilization), not simply completing assigned tasks.
* Work-lead expectations (non-supervisory): providing technical direction and task coordination for defined work efforts (e.g., change windows or deployments) while escalations and staffing remain with management.
** Position Dimensions and Impact to the University:
** This is an essential position and is 100% on-site.

The University of Washington relies on enterprise wired network infrastructure to support teaching, learning, research, clinical care, and administrative operations across multiple campuses, UW Medicine sites, and remote locations. This position contributes directly to network availability, change quality, and service continuity by owning the engineering work needed to deploy and operate network services reliably  Grade 9 Network Engineer is typically accountable for one or more defined service areas or…