Network Engineer, Corporate & Data Center (Contract) - Locals only to California

Syncreon Consulting•Palo Alto, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

This role involves designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise network infrastructure, focusing on corporate, data center, and security aspects. The engineer will be responsible for maintaining and optimizing LAN, WLAN, and datacenter networks, as well as managing Palo Alto Networks firewalls and ensuring network reliability and automation.

Requirements

10 years of hands-on enterprise network engineering experience.
Proficiency with Palo Alto Networks NGFWs and Panorama; experience with security policy management, zone-based segmentation, and GlobalProtect VPN.
Solid understanding of routing and switching fundamentals: BGP, OSPF, STP/RSTP, VLANs, LACP, and L2/L3 design.
Experience designing and supporting enterprise wireless networks (Cisco Meraki, Aruba, or equivalent); familiarity with 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 and RF optimization.
Working knowledge of datacenter networking concepts: spine-leaf, VxLAN/EVPN, and high-availability failover.
Strong troubleshooting methodology—comfortable working through complex multi-layer problems in production environments.
Effective written and verbal communication; able to produce clear runbooks and incident postmortems.

Responsibilities

Design and maintain the corporate LAN, including access/distribution/core switching, VLANs, STP, and QoS for Palo Alto HQ and remote offices.
Manage and optimize the wireless LAN infrastructure (controller-based and cloud-managed), including site surveys, RF planning, SSID design, and client troubleshooting.
Administer 802.1X network access control, certificate-based authentication, and guest network segmentation.
Operate and evolve the datacenter network, including spine-leaf architecture, BGP, VxLAN/EVPN overlays, and high-availability designs.
Ensure network stability and performance across on-premises datacenter infrastructure, proactively monitoring capacity and latency baselines.
Partner with Server, Storage, and Platform Engineering teams on rack-and-stack connectivity, new service deployments, and capacity expansions.
Manage Palo Alto Networks NGFW platforms (PA-Series, Panorama, SCM), including security policy, App-ID, URL filtering, Threat Prevention, and WildFire integration.
Administer GlobalProtect VPN and Prisma Access for remote access and enforce zero-trust network segmentation between zones.
Conduct firewall rule reviews, clean up unused policies, and support periodic security audits.
Monitor network health using observability tooling (SNMP, streaming telemetry, NetFlow/sFlow) and drive resolution of incidents and root-cause analyses.
Develop and maintain automation scripts and configuration management workflows (Python, Ansible, Terraform) to reduce toil and improve consistency.