Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. When the network degrades at one of those sites, officers lose real-time biometric checks against watchlists, agents miss court-mandated deadlines for processing apprehensions, and surveillance feeds go dark. DHS oversight reviews have documented outages that left tens of thousands of travelers queued at a single airport. We are hiring network engineers and architects across several levels to design, build, and sustain that infrastructure. You will work on routing and switching, WAN and LAN transport, wireless, segmentation, and firewalls in a mixed Cisco, Juniper, and Arista environment, alongside field deployment teams, cloud engineers, and security staff. Change windows in a 24/7 environment are narrow, so the work rewards people who plan carefully over people who move fast. Some of these sites are remote and hard to reach, which means the design that works in a lab is not automatically the design that survives at a checkpoint three hours from the nearest office.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and sustain that infrastructure; Work on routing and switching, WAN and LAN transport, wireless, segmentation, and firewalls in a mixed Cisco, Juniper, and Arista environment; Work alongside field deployment teams, cloud engineers, and security staff; Keep the network dependable at sites where an outage stops mission work; Modernize the network without taking the mission offline; Close the gap between how the network is documented and how it behaves

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in management information systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (e.g. Networking and Telecommunications) with 10+ years of experience performing network engineering or 14+ years of network engineering experience without a bachelor's degree; Minimum of ten (10) years of verifiable network engineering experience supporting a large, complex Federal agency; Strong knowledge of networking protocols, such as TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, MPLS, VPNs and VLANs; Expertise and experience with Cisco technology and Firewall technologies; Ability to perform firewall changes; Hands-on experience with SDN technologies such as Cisco ACI or VMware NSX; Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to troubleshoot complex network issues; Delivers high-level technical leadership to meet or exceed established project goals; U.S. Citizenship required

Nice to have

Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD (strongly preferred); Active industry certifications such as CCNA, CCNP (routing and switching); Experience and expertise with Zero Trust (Zscaler) and Palo Alto technologies; Previous experience CBP highly desired, followed by DHS or DoW; Advanced skills in 3 or more of the following: Cisco SD-WAN, Cisco Hyperflex, Cisco StealthWatch, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco Firepower; Willing to be cross trained in the above technologies; Kept a distributed network running where downtime had consequences beyond user frustration; Modernized live infrastructure under change control, not only built new environments; Worked at remote or austere sites and can describe what you did differently because of it; Operated in mixed-vendor environments and are not dependent on one vendor's tooling; Active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance; Can work inside federal change management and accreditation without treating it as an obstacle; Certifications such as CCNP, CCIE, or JNCIP are useful but not a substitute for having done the work

Benefits

$10,000 signing bonus for candidates with an active CBP BI, payable after 90 days under standard terms; Health Insurance; Life Insurance; Paid Time Off; Holiday Pay; Short-term and long-term Disability; Retirement; Learning and Development opportunities; Other optional benefit elections