Network Engineer / Network Administrator
Owns the connectivity: the office network, the VPN, the firewalls, the links between sites, and the latency somebody is complaining about.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
A seat only where there is physical infrastructure to own — offices, warehouses, retail sites, a factory floor — or where the network is the product, as at an internet or telecom provider. A cloud-native software company usually has no need for one, which is itself a useful thing to know before writing the job description.
Education
No requirement; vendor certification is the currency in this field and employers read it.
Experience
4+ years on comparable infrastructure. Ask about an outage they diagnosed, and how they proved where the fault was.
Vertical / domain experience
Vendor domain is decisive: Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet and the cloud-native networking stacks are different ecosystems with different certifications.
What it pays, roughly
$72,800 median, Canada — for Technical occupations in computer and information systems, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $65,458 to $74,880 over 134,170 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| CCNA / CCNP — Cisco networking | Cisco | The best-known networking ladder, and still the default currency. | Study |
| CompTIA Network+ | CompTIA | Vendor-neutral grounding, typically earlier in a career. | — |
| Cloud networking specialty certifications | AWS, Microsoft Azure | Where the network is virtual, which in a software company it entirely is. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. Use the office router the landlord supplied and move on.
Nobody, unless you have premises that matter. Outsource to a managed provider.
A seat where physical sites, regulated connectivity or the product itself depends on the network.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- IT Systems Administrator / Sysadmin
- DevOps Engineer / DevOps Specialist
- Chief Information Security Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
Networking merges into systems administration in a small company and into DevOps in a cloud-native one.
Keep separate from
No conflict. Keep firewall change approval separate from firewall change implementation once there is an audit.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Diagrams the network before changing it
- Can prove where a fault is rather than guessing
- Keeps configuration under version control
Red flags
- Undocumented changes made live
- No monitoring of the links
- Firewall rules nobody can explain
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
Agencies almost never need this. If a client does, subcontract it rather than hiring.
On a client contract
On contract in an enterprise estate, expect their network team to be a gate you must plan around — firewall change requests have lead times measured in weeks.
In a product company
In a software product company this is a cloud configuration problem, which belongs to DevOps rather than to a network engineer.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CNAPP & Cloud Security Posture Management | Wiz, now inside Google | Agentless scanning needs cloud-account trust relationships, and those are granted once and rarely re-granted | The research → |
| Workflow Automation — BPA, iPaaS & RPA | Microsoft Power Automate across the board; by segment, UiPath (RPA), ServiceNow (enterprise workflow), Workato / Boomi / MuleSoft (iPaaS) and Zapier… | Hundreds of live automations wired into production systems, each with its own credentials, connectors and edge-case logic | The research → |