Senior Network Systems Engineer (Defense)

Location: East Palo Alto, California, United States. The role requires approximately 50% domestic travel to customer and field sites.

Salary: $140,000–$185,000 per year, plus equity in most full-time high-demand roles.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous weapons, sensors, and battlefield systems supported by distributed networks and real-time data infrastructure.

What you will do

• Design, deploy, and maintain L2/L3 network infrastructure, including routing, switching, VLANs, trunking, QoS, and VPN tunnels.
• Configure and operate Linux-based network appliances using systemd-networkd, Netplan, iptables, StrongSwan, and WireGuard.
• Build infrastructure-as-code with Ansible and Terraform to automate network and compute provisioning.
• Deploy and manage AWS GovCloud and Commercial infrastructure, including EC2, VPC, Transit Gateway, and Security Groups.
• Collect and analyze network telemetry with Grafana, Telegraf, and related tools.
• Install, commission, troubleshoot, and support deployed systems at customer and field sites; contribute to design reviews, deployment planning, mentoring, and operational best practices.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on network engineering experience with vendor-agnostic routers and switches.
• Strong L2/L3 networking fundamentals, including BGP, OSPF or Babel, VLANs, trunking, QoS, NAT/PAT, multicast, IPv4, and IPv6.
• Strong Linux systems experience with systemd, networkd, Netplan, iptables, SSH, and Docker.
• Experience with site-to-site and remote-access VPNs using IPsec, StrongSwan, or WireGuard.
• Hands-on infrastructure automation with Ansible or Terraform, plus scripting in Bash, Python, or Go; knowledge of PKI, IPsec, and FIPS compliance requirements.
• AWS experience with VPC design, EC2, Security Groups, and Transit Gateway, along with willingness and ability to travel approximately 50% domestically.

Nice to have

• MANET radios and mesh networking experience in defense or tactical environments.
• Familiarity with NIST/CMMC compliance frameworks and VXLAN overlays.
• Knowledge of IGMP/PIM multicast routing, DHCP/DNS infrastructure at scale, or telemetry pipelines using InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana.

Culture & Benefits

• Premium healthcare with three plan options, including an HSA-eligible plan, with 80% of premiums covered for employees and dependents.
• Company-paid basic life, AD&D, short-term, and long-term disability insurance.
• 20 days of accrued PTO, an extensive holiday calendar, and a winter break in December.
• At least 7 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
• $9,000 annual tuition reimbursement or professional development stipend.
• 401(k) plan with traditional, Roth, and after-tax deferral options and company matching up to 4%.

Hiring process

• Recruiters provide additional information about compensation and benefits during the hiring process.
• The position may require eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.