[Hiring] Network & Firewall Engineer @Uptime Solutions

Role Description

Fully remote - South Africa - work from home.

Industry - MSP.

Salary - Up to R38,000 basic per month plus benefits.

Hours - US hours (typically 3 pm - 12 am 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 maintain clean documentation for tickets, network changes, monitoring findings, and client-facing updates.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Preferred Skills

• 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 platforms such as Halo and documentation tools such as Hudu.
• Experience with RMM tools such as Ninja and ScreenConnect.