Senior Network Engineer — Managed Services

We at Acxelsus are on a mission to showcase exceptional Filipino talent globally. Beyond educational credentials and professional experience, we highly prioritize passion, dedication, loyalty, and a proactive attitude towards personal growth. Our foundation is built upon a set of core values - R.I.G.H.T. - representing Reliability, Integrity, Goal-Oriented mindset, Happiness, and Teamwork. These values define our identity and guide our approach to achieving success. If you are passionate about advancing your career, forging genuine connections, and becoming part of a team committed to your success, join us! Job Overview The Senior Network Engineer (L3) is a senior technical resource within the Managed Services organization responsible for supporting, maintaining, troubleshooting, and optimizing enterprise network and security environments. This role serves as a key escalation point for complex incidents, major outages, infrastructure changes, and project implementations while ensuring the availability, performance, and security of customer networks.  The ideal candidate must possess strong hands-on experience in enterprise routing and switching (BGP, OSPF, MPLS, LAN/WAN, VLANs, STP, HSRP/VRRP, and SD-WAN) together with advanced administration and troubleshooting expertise across Palo Alto (PAN-OS, Panorama, GlobalProtect), Fortinet (FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer), and Cisco Secure Firewall platforms (FTD/FMC) . The role requires a strong operational mindset with ownership of incidents, root cause analysis, change implementations, and continuous service improvement initiatives. Key Responsibilities Incident Lifecycle Ownership: Own the full lifecycle of complex network and firewall incidents — from detection through resolution and post-incident review — ensuring accountability for technical outcomes, stability, and documentation. Critical Incident Leadership: Lead investigation and resolution of critical network incidents, driving coordination across internal teams, vendors, and customer stakeholders. End-to-End Technical Ownership: Make technical decisions and take end-to-end ownership of network issues, driving resolution without reliance on further escalation. Project Delivery: Lead technical delivery of network projects, including scoping, estimation, design, and implementation. Root Cause Analysis: Perform root cause analysis and develop long-term remediation strategies to prevent recurrence of network issues. Change Validation: Validate and approve network changes, designs, and remediation strategies to ensure quality and compliance. Infrastructure Management: Configure, maintain, and troubleshoot Cisco, Palo Alto, and Fortinet networking and firewall equipment. Environment Optimization: Conduct targeted cleanup and improvements of existing network environments to ensure stability and scalability, minimizing customer downtime. Security Collaboration: Collaborate with the security team to ensure proper network hardening is in place and that all risks are properly mitigated or remediated. Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers. Documentation: Contribute to architecture documentation, diagrams, and operational runbooks. Qualifications Education: A degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field. Experience: 10+ years of experience within an MSP, VAR, ISP, NOC, or enterprise IT environment, with a strong focus on troubleshooting and maintaining multi-client network infrastructure. Firewall Platforms: Advanced, hands-on experience managing enterprise firewalls across all three of the following: Cisco FTD/FMC , Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS/Panorama , Fortinet FortiGate/FortiManager Routing & Switching: Strong, demonstrable troubleshooting depth in TCP/IP, OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, IPSec, SNMP, STP, VTP, and VLANs — with the ability to describe specific production issues diagnosed and resolved (e.g., BGP route advertisement failures, OSPF adjacency stuck in Exstart/Exchange, STP topology change storms), not just conceptual familiarity. Firewall Rule Optimization: Experience conducting firewall rule cleanup and optimization in legacy environments — hit-count analysis, shadowed rule detection, and a structured decommission process with stakeholder confirmation and change approval. Virtualized Network Infrastructure: Experience with network infrastructure in virtualized environments (VMware or similar), including virtual switches, VLAN configuration, and network segmentation. OSI-Layer & Application Troubleshooting: Experience with application-level troubleshooting, packet inspection, and cross-OSI-layer performance and connectivity diagnostics. MSP Operations: Direct experience tracking billable time against client tickets/projects (target ~70% utilization) using an ITSM/PSA platform (e.g., ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, ServiceNow), and working within a formal ITIL-based change management process (CAB awareness, standard/normal/emergency change categories, rollback planning). Incident Ownership & RCA: Proven, first-person experience owning critical network incidents end-to-end — from detection through post-incident review — including producing formal root cause analyses (not just informal fixes) and identifying recurring problems to drive systemic, long-term remediation. Customer Communication: Proven ability to communicate directly with client stakeholders during incidents — setting expectations, taking visible ownership, and avoiding blame-shifting under pressure. Mentorship: Demonstrated experience mentoring or coaching junior engineers, with a specific example of measurable impact on their capability or an outcome. Language: Excellent written and verbal English communication skills for client-facing and cross-team collaboration. Availability: Willingness and demonstrated prior experience working US EST/PST hours (7am–7pm EST window, with potential extension to 7pm PST), including after-hours or weekend on-call coverage. Preferred Qualifications Certifications: Active CCNP (Enterprise) or equivalent; Palo Alto PCNSE or Fortinet NSE 4/7 also valued. Active/current certification status matters more than possession alone — lapsed certifications are a yellow flag given how fast platform versions change. Cloud Networking: Experience troubleshooting network-layer issues in AWS, Azure, or GCP — e.g., VPC Flow Logs, AWS Reachability Analyzer, Azure Network Watcher, route table inspection, security group vs. NACL layering — beyond simply provisioning compute. Cisco CUCM: Experience with Cisco Unified Communications Manager and enterprise voice/UC infrastructure — device registration troubleshooting, TFTP config checks, and VLAN/DHCP/QoS verification for voice traffic. Network Automation: Experience writing automation scripts from scratch (not just modifying existing ones) using Python (Netmiko/Paramiko/NAPALM) or Ansible, with a measurable operational outcome (time saved, errors reduced). Network Security Practices: Experience with network hardening, monitoring, and threat assessment practices. MSP/ITIL Exposure: Prior experience in an MSP environment with exposure to ITIL-based service delivery models. Customer-Facing Projects: Experience delivering customer-facing IT network projects, from scoping through delivery and handover. AI Tool Fluency: Practical use of AI tools for troubleshooting, config analysis, or RCA drafting — with demonstrated critical verification of AI output before applying it to production environments (a specific instance of catching an AI error is a strong positive signal). Work Arrangement & Schedule Fully remote following EST Time Zone After-hours and weekend coverage may be required on occasion. All necessary equipment is provided  Ready to experience the #AcxelsusAdvantage ? Join our team today!