Network Engineer

Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions. We thrive on finding and cultivating talented people who are passionate about what they do. Join us and be a part of the diverse Caltech community.

Job Summary

The Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) has seismic stations located at approximately 400 sites throughout Southern California. Under general direction, this position is responsible for the administration and management of system-level networking infrastructure in Pasadena, in AWS, and at remote field locations, including routers, switches, gateways, bridges, and firewalls.

Working from the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, the Network Engineer also configures and maintains field-deployed hardware for the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN), including dataloggers, cellular modems, and routers. The Network Engineer plans, schedules, and implements software upgrades for both local and field networking equipment. In addition, the incumbent monitors, optimizes, and tunes network systems to ensure data integrity, high availability, and low-latency performance. The Network Engineer follows established standard operating procedures to ensure consistency and repeatability across network operations. The position is also responsible for ensuring that all networking equipment complies with institutional data communications standards, information technology security policies, and applicable operational best practices.

Essential Job Duties

• Maintain the Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure supporting the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN).
• Maintain and troubleshoot network infrastructure components, including routers, switches, gateways, bridges, Linux servers, and firewalls.
• Maintain the SCSN routing architecture, including dynamic and static routing protocols, and manage the TCP/IP network infrastructure.
• Monitor network performance by integrating new technologies with existing and legacy systems while ensuring operational continuity.
• Provide technical support to field engineers by diagnosing and resolving network and communications equipment failures.
• Ensure network infrastructure complies with institutional information technology security policies, standards, and best practices.
• Install, configure, and utilize network monitoring and analysis tools to assess network and radio frequency (RF) performance, identify issues, and implement corrective actions.
• Ensure the proper installation, configuration, operation, and maintenance of communications networks and associated equipment.
• Serve as a technical resource for staff by providing expertise on network and systems issues, maintaining technical documentation, and delivering training and knowledge transfer as needed.
• Utilize the designated ticketing system to document, track, and manage assigned tasks and support requests.
• Provide regular status updates and actively participate in technical, operational, and strategic planning meetings.
• This is an on-site position at the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science degree or three years of related work experience.
• Solid understanding of TCP/IP, OSI layers and networking protocols, and networking fundamentals.
• Knowledge and hands-on experience in computer networking, including switches, routers, and routing protocols, such as BGP and OSPF.
• Working knowledge of tools like ping, traceroute, tcpdump, Wireshark, nmap, and netstat to analyze network performance and identify bottlenecks.
• Experience in Linux operating systems.
• Good oral and written communication skills, including writing technical documents.
• Excellent team player with the ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Ability to work on multiple tasks simultaneously and set priorities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree with at least 2 years of work experience.
• Operational experience of production network operations in a low-latency environment.
• Ability to learn any network operating system, including but not limited to Cisco, Palo Alto, Juniper, MikroTik, and Arista, and to adapt to new network tools, methods, and devices as needed.
• Knowledge of virtualization tools for networking simulation and testing.
• Hands-on experience with network monitoring systems (e.g., SolarWinds, Zabbix), packet analysis, and performance tuning.
• Proficiency in Linux environment, shell scripting, and Python.
• Sound knowledge of GitHub/GitLab.
• Solid knowledge and hands-on experience with software-defined networking (SDN).
• Experience with management and automation tools such as Ansible, Proxmox, etc.
• Knowledge and experience with container networking, such as Kubernetes and Docker.

Required Documents

• Resume
• Cover Letter