Network Engineer — Enterprise, Cloud and Federal Networks, US Employers

Enterprises, hospitals, universities, carriers and government contractors across the United States hire network engineers to design, build and keep running the networks everything else depends on. The role now spans traditional on-premises infrastructure and cloud networking, and the balance between those two is the main thing that varies between otherwise identical postings.

What the work involves

Configuring and troubleshooting routers, switches and firewalls, designing addressing and segmentation, managing change windows, and being the person who has to prove it is not the network. Increasingly it also means building the same things in a cloud provider's virtual network and automating the configuration rather than typing it.

Requirements

• Routing and switching in depth: BGP, OSPF and EIGRP, plus VLANs, subnetting, DNS and DHCP
• Vendor platforms in production — Cisco IOS and Meraki most often, with Fortinet, Palo Alto and SonicWall common on the firewall side
• CompTIA Network+ or CCNA for junior roles; senior roles ask for what you have run before they ask for certificates
• Monitoring and troubleshooting tooling such as SolarWinds or Datadog, and the discipline to document what you find
• Cloud and hybrid networking on AWS or Azure, now assumed rather than a bonus
• Automation — Python, PowerShell or Ansible — for anything configured more than twice

How the pay is structured

• Operations and administration roles sit against network and computer systems administrators: a $99,130 median as of May 2025, the lowest tenth under $62,640 and the highest tenth above $155,050
• Design and architecture roles sit against computer network architects: a $134,050 median, the lowest tenth under $79,900 and the highest tenth above $202,680
• Cleared federal work pays a premium over the commercial equivalent, because the eligible pool is small

Before you apply

Ask how much of the role is design and how much is operations. Those are two different federal occupations with $34,920 between their medians, and the job title on the advertisement will not tell you which one you are being offered.

Check whether the role needs a security clearance. Federal and defence postings around Washington DC and Virginia frequently do. A clearance requires US citizenship and an employer to sponsor it, and cannot be obtained independently.

Note: pay, on-call expectations, clearance requirements and any sponsorship decision are set by each employer — not by JobGader. Confirm the details on the employer's own advertisement before applying.