Open Position:
Closed Position:
Senior Network Engineer

Lead the design of open access community fiber-optic networks across the U.S.

This position closed on
5/15/2023

General Info

Location:
Colorado Springs, CO
Type:
Full Time
Experience:
Mid-level
Department:
Network & Cloud Infrastructure
Reports to:
Head of Cloud, Network, & Operations

Compensation

Salary Range:
$140k-160k depending on experience
*
Benefits:
Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Disability Insurance, Paid Family Leave, and 401k.
*In compliance with Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act the salary for this role is listed. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidate's relevant work experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location.
*Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidate's relevant work experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location.

About Underline

Underline starts with our people.

At Underline, we've rapidly built a culture around ownership, trust, community, and innovation. Underline is dedicated to cultivating a growth environment where people feel valued, work with a purpose of mission, are personally rewarded, and are professionally challenged.

Are you ready to join this team and transform American communities?

Underline was founded in 2019 with a singular mission: to ensure the vibrancy of our nation through building intelligent community infrastructure in a socially equitable manner. We work with American communities to design, finance, and construct open access fiber-optic networks. These networks are critical to secure internet access that’s fast, affordable, and fair. As open access networks, this infrastructure is also the essential foundation for distributed healthcare services, new wireless solutions, and resilient infrastructure including modernized water systems and responsible energy creation. Our first two projects are in Colorado Springs and Fountain, Colorado.

About this Position

We’re looking for a full-time Senior Network Engineer to join our Engineering team. This engineer will be responsible for complex network issues and troubleshooting as well as the day-to-day supervision and mentorship of the local network team to manage network infrastructure. In time, this role could evolve to a managerial position, managing network teams in multiple Underline communities. 

Our Engineering team responds to the needs of the business, delivering well-designed and strategically aligned technology solutions in network architecture and design, customer acquisition, network service provider connectivity, and operations and support systems. This role will support, onboard, configure, automation, and monitor the infrastructure supported by the Network Operation Center (NOC). This is a critical function that acts as a liaison between the end user, network, systems, SOC, and architecture teams.

Spend your time helping us connect America, one community at a time.

Does this sound like you?

  • You have a strong “player/coach” mentality where you are both a doer and a natural leader
  • You are hungry, humble, and curious
  • You have excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
  • You are an intrinsic self-starter and enjoy taking on new challenges
  • You thrive in a collaborative environment, comprised of diverse subject matter experts in finance, government, infrastructure, and tech
  • You care about building critical intelligent infrastructure to increase community vitality and improve resilience
  • You see everyone in the company as your customer, always striving to delight by providing top notch customer service
  • You’re an innovator and you want to help develop creative technology products that help communities upgrade their infrastructure and that help investors find our innovative investment opportunities

What you'd be doing:

  • Responsibility includes day-to-day supervision of the local Network Engineering site teams, ensuring the availability of the supported multiple site networks, as well as building and maintaining partnerships with the infrastructure, architecture, application, and field support teams
  • Supervises all aspects of the local Network Engineering team, including assignment of IT projects and/or production support and maintains customer service-oriented environment
  • Ensures team members receive detailed, accurate and timely training for all new and existing job functions
  • Maintain a high-level knowledge of all network technology that supports Underline operations. This includes a comprehensive understanding of switches, routers, firewalls, and networking protocols such as BGP, TCP/IP, VXLAN,QinQ, etc.
  • You will be a subject matter expert (SME) to support and troubleshoot to resolve issues
  • Developing software automation solutions for configuring and monitoring our networking devices, reducing manual tasks, and improving service delivery 
  • In-depth knowledge of latest technologies with the ability to troubleshoot from OSI  layer-1 to layer-7
  • Proactively identifies opportunities for network operations teams to minimize or eliminate repetitive work through automation scripts
  • Ensures operational problems are identified, escalated, communicated, and resolved in a timely manner and a root cause and permanent solution are applied
  • Manage smooth operations of IT help desk, Service desk, On-call support, Problem, Incident & change management.
  • Develop and implement maintenance procedures, monitor systems health, gather system statistics, and troubleshoot reported errors and alarms
  • Provide regular operational metrics and manage with continuous improvement with appropriate measurements, KIP’s and metrics
  • Travel for in-person meetings with all site teams at least Monthly
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation describing the network environment, including network diagrams of existing and all new designs
  • Monitor incident tickets and ensure timely responses and resolutions to problems or incidents 
  • Perform advanced troubleshooting of network hardware and security systems to resolve operational issues and restore services. Document the resolution in the ticketing system
  • Supervise network team members’ ticket responses and ensure that tickets are being handled within SLAs
  • Manage assigned projects and program components to deliver services in accordance with established objectives
  • Ensure that current and future data centers are well maintained, connected, and the network documentation is in line with compliance, audit, and management requirements
  • Ensure security and compliance for perimeter and internal services 
  • Participate in and improve escalation and emergency response with a detailed postmortem while addressing issues systematically to prevent future occurrences

Experience we require:

  • At least 10 years experience in hands-on  Network Engineering, preferably in the telecommunications industry with 2-6 years of supervisory experience
  • Deep knowledge of network protocols and standards, especially ethernet routing, switching, bridging, virtual LANs,VXLAN, QinQ, MPLS,BGP etc.
  • 4+ years of experience with using Python, Ansible, REST APIs, Linux, NETCONF, Jinja, or similar tools in a Network Automation environment
  • Hands-on experience developing automation solutions for a tiered Zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) and infrastructure automation (IA) solution for the bring-up and automation of complex High-Performance Network infrastructure.
  • Network programmability experience, including Model-driven Programmability: YANG models, NETCONF, RESTCONF, Python network automation: Netmiko, NAPALM, ncclient, PyATS, Nornir, Software-defined Networking, Zero-touch Provisioning
  • Familiarity with major municipal network architectures and standards such as GPON, Active Ethernet, millimeter wave, DOCSIS, and HFC
  • Real life hands-on experience troubleshooting complex network L1 to L3 related issues.
  • Experience with Linux operating systems, and especially with Linux networking
  • Familiarity with IT compliance areas such as change management, incident response, and configuration management
  • Familiarity with network and connectivity troubleshooting from both a user endpoint perspective as well as server and networking infrastructure perspective

Bonus points:

  • Experience with scripting languages or programming languages such as Python
  • Cisco, Juniper, or similar network design, configuration, and/or operations certifications ITIL, CCNA and CCNP a big plus!

Hiring Manager

Kinan Shahid
Head of Cloud, Network, & Operations

Unsure about applying?

Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But here’s the thing: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. Underline is a place where everyone can grow. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.

Position Application

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We maintain exceptionally high standards for talent and recognize that there are many paths to developing expertise. We don't discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, age, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factors. If you have the skills we need and the ambition to grow fast with us, that's all that matters.