Virtual Network Engineer, full-time, fully remote, $105,000 a year, open to candidates anywhere.
Responsibilities
- Design, configure, and maintain network infrastructure across the organization
- Monitor performance and security continuously, not just when something looks wrong
- Troubleshoot connectivity issues wherever they show up, from a single office to the whole network
Here's a real one: a VPN tunnel kept dropping every afternoon at almost the exact same time, and it took two full days to trace it to a fragmented MTU setting that only caused trouble once traffic crossed a certain packet size. Nothing about the symptom pointed directly to MTU. Getting there took ruling out three other more obvious suspects first, which is a fairly normal week in this role.
Design work runs alongside the firefighting. New office locations have network builds planned ahead of time, existing switch configurations are reviewed for anything that's grown messy over years of quick fixes, and capacity is checked before a location outgrows its current setup rather than after complaints start rolling in.
Skills
- Routing and switching
- TCP/IP
- Firewalls
- VPNs
- Network monitoring tools
- CCNA or a comparable certification
CCNP is a genuine plus over CCNA alone, and it'll get noticed in an application, though it's not required to clear the door. What matters more day-to-day is whether the certification knowledge shows up in how someone actually troubleshoots, not just what's listed on a resume.
Firewall work covers both configuration and ongoing review, not a one-time setup. Rules that made sense two years ago sometimes stop making sense once the systems they were protecting have changed, and part of the job is catching that drift rather than leaving old rules in place indefinitely because nobody's had time to revisit them.
What gets you hired
You'll need a four-year degree in computer science or something in that same family, along with a CCNA or CCNP certification. Hands-on experience configuring and troubleshooting enterprise networks is expected, and this role requires 30 months of such experience. That's real production network experience, not a home lab setup or a certification earned without ever touching a live enterprise environment.
People land in this role from a few different starting points. Some come up through help desk work that grew into network responsibility. Others go straight into networking after certification. Both paths are fine as long as the 30 months of hands-on enterprise work are genuinely in place.
None of the 30 months has to come from a single employer. Someone who spent 18 months at one company and another year at a different one, both doing genuine enterprise network work, meets the bar just as well as someone with one continuous stretch. What gets scrutinized in the interview is the depth of that experience, not how it's split across a resume.
Pay and benefits
This role pays $105,000 a year. On the benefits side, there's a 401(k) match, paid time off, and health coverage, plus reimbursement for networking certification costs, including renewals. Life and disability insurance are also part of the package, which is a step up from what many remote network roles at this level offer.
Naukri Mitra is handling recruitment for this opening, and the certification reimbursement in particular covers CCNP if someone wants to pursue it after starting, not just costs incurred before hire.
Compared to network engineer remote salary figures for someone at the two-and-a-half-year mark, this one lands solidly above average, largely because the environment spans enough locations that the networking problems here are genuinely more complex than a single-office setup.
How the team runs
The network team is small and fully distributed, which puts real weight on documentation. A change to a firewall rule or a routing table needs to be documented clearly enough that someone in a different time zone can pick up the thread without a live handoff call. This is standard for network engineering jobs worldwide with fully remote teams, but it's worth saying directly, since it changes how the work actually gets done day-to-day.
On-call rotates roughly every four weeks. Most weeks pass without a page, but network issues that do arise tend to affect multiple people at once, so response time matters more here than in some other infrastructure roles, where a single service going down affects a smaller slice of the business.
New hires typically shadow an existing engineer on a handful of real tickets before taking independent ownership, since every network has its own history of workarounds and legacy configurations that no amount of documentation can fully capture.
Security monitoring isn't handed off to a separate team. Watching for unusual traffic patterns, reviewing firewall logs, and flagging anything that looks like it shouldn't be there falls directly within this role, which means the security and networking sides of the job stay closely tied together rather than split across two teams that don't talk much.
Applying
Send a resume along with a short account of a network issue you diagnosed that turned out to have a less obvious cause than it first appeared. Interviews include a technical round covering routing, troubleshooting, and network security, followed by a brief conversation about schedule and time zone coverage. Most candidates hear back within two weeks.
