Network Engineer
Fully remote - South Africa - work from home
Industry - MSP
Salary - Up to R38,000 basic per month plus benefits
Hours - US hours (typically 3pm - 12am SAST)
ROLE OVERVIEW
- Own day-to-day network monitoring, troubleshooting, configuration, and documentation for client and internal environments.
- Support network gear remotely, including switches, firewalls, routers, access points, and VPNs connected at the Fair Lawn site.
- Work closely with NEs; coordinate with Engineers when physical access is required.
- Operate with MSP discipline: clear ticket notes, safe changes, proactive monitoring, and customer-ready communication.
DAILY MONITORING FOCUS
- Availability: Internet/WAN/LAN uptime, VPN tunnel status, firewall/switch/AP health, and key device alerts.
- Performance: bandwidth usage, network speed, interface utilization, latency, jitter, packet loss, and ping drops.
- Wireless: AP status, SSID availability, roaming/client drops, coverage concerns, and dashboard/controller alerts.
- Escalation: document findings, identify trends, summarize business impact, and escalate to Local NEs with next steps.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
- Troubleshoot outages, slow network reports, VPN failures, wireless issues, VLAN problems, DHCP/DNS symptoms, routing issues, and intermittent connectivity.
- Configure VLANs, trunks/access ports, ACLs, NAT, routes, SSIDs, DHCP relay, firewall policies, SSL VPN, and IPsec/site-to-site VPN tunnels.
- Perform remote changes using backups, change notes, testing steps, rollback plans, and clear escalation paths.
- Maintain clean documentation for tickets, network changes, monitoring findings, and client-facing updates.
MUST-HAVE SKILLS
- Hands-on experience with Cisco, Cisco Meraki, Fortinet/FortiGate, and Palo Alto-class network environments.
- VPN setup and troubleshooting experience is mandatory, especially SSL VPN and IPsec/site-to-site VPN.
- Firewall experience: policies, NAT, ACLs, routing, DNS impact, log review, and security rule troubleshooting.
- Switching/routing experience: VLANs, STP, trunks, access ports, port channels/EtherChannel, inter-VLAN routing, routing tables and reserving IPs.
- Wireless experience: access point support, SSIDs, roaming/client drops, coverage issues, and Meraki/controller dashboard alerts.
- Monitoring mindset: uptime, latency, packet loss, bandwidth saturation, interface errors, AP failures, and recurring degradation patterns.
- Remote change discipline: backups, change notes, validation, rollback plan, and coordination with on-site smart-hands.
- Strong communication: clear ticket updates, escalation notes, change summaries, and client-ready impact statements.
PREFERRED SKILLS
- Certifications such as CCNA, CCNP Enterprise/Security, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Meraki, or equivalent credentials.
- MSP experience supporting multiple clients, different network standards, and urgent network escalations.
- Supporting Go-lives and Network migrations before, during and after onboarding new clients
- Experience with Cisco Catalyst, Meraki MX/MS/MR, FortiSwitch, FortiAP, Cisco ASA/Firepower, Palo Alto, and FortiGate platforms.
- Adjacent technical exposure: Cisco ISE, Zscaler, SD-WAN, CUCM/voice networks, syslog, Azure, VMware/Hyper-V, Linux, and Windows servers.
- Experience with ticketing/PSA platform such as Halo and Documentation tool such as Hudu.
- Experience with RMM tools such as Ninja and ScreenConnect
