San Francisco Network Engineer · Senior, Fixed Prices
Not every Bay Area business needs a full-time network engineer — but when you need one, you need a real one. A senior engineer, Cisco-certified, Fortinet-certified, with 20+ years on networks only: the firewall, the switches, Wi-Fi, the links between offices, and remote access. Design, fixes, migrations, or an ongoing plan. Start with a Network Risk Assessment, fixed price from $3,500, or a managed plan in San Francisco from $695 per site per month. Serving San Francisco, the Peninsula, East Bay, and the broader Bay Area.
Track Record
We only do networks. That is not a limitation — it is why the outcomes are different.
Years of network-only practice. Architecture, security, and operations — not IT generalism.
Sites delivered. Healthcare clinics, law offices, financial branches, multi-site operations.
Design target for fully redundant builds with HA firewalls, diverse ISPs, and backed-up power.
The same senior engineer is your point of contact on every engagement. No junior handoffs. No ticket queue. No escalation chain.
Career aggregate. The 20+ years and 300+ sites span the operator’s full network-only practice, including prior-employer engagements. 99.99% availability, about 53 minutes of downtime per year, is an architecture design target for engagements that fund full redundancy. It is not a service guarantee or uptime SLA. Contracted response times and service levels are defined in each customer agreement.
Why Companies Hire a Network Engineer Like This
Bay Area businesses face a particularly acute version of the network engineering gap: a full-time senior network engineer in San Francisco costs an estimated $180k–$220k loaded, and recruiting one often takes 4–6 months. If you need 5–20 hours/month of network engineering with surge capacity for projects, you don’t need a 40-hour-a-week hire. Fractional senior engineering fixes that gap at a small fraction of the cost.
Cisco-certified, Fortinet-certified, CompTIA-certified. 20+ years exclusively on networks — architecture, security, and operations. Past engagements include Fortune 500 networks; the same caliber of engineering, applied to mid-market Bay Area organizations. Verifiable credentials.
FortiGate firewalls, Cisco Catalyst switching, Aruba/Cisco wireless, Juniper SRX, Arista 7000 series. Multi-vendor environments are the norm in real Bay Area businesses, particularly companies that have grown through acquisition or absorbed legacy infrastructure. Your engineer should be able to work in whatever you actually have.
Three engagement modes: Project (firewall migration from $6,500, SD-WAN $7,500 plus $1,750 per spoke, ZTNA or SSL-VPN replacement quoted after a short review of your users, rules and applications — defined scope, fixed price once scoped); Retainer (Co-Managed Bench, Architecture Oversight or Embedded Authority, prepaid hour blocks, or a managed plan from $695 per site per month); Network Risk Assessment (from $3,500, about two weeks, written report, yours to keep). Pick whichever fits your situation.
Bay Area B2B SaaS and fintech companies face SOC 2 audit cycles, customer security questionnaires, and the kind of network-controls scrutiny enterprise customers require before signing. Every change starts with a documented design and ends with documented evidence. The diagrams, configs, and decision records become assets your security team can actually use.
Bay Area Hiring Market Context
A full-time senior network engineer in San Francisco costs an estimated $180k–$220k loaded (base salary plus benefits, tax and equipment). For a mid-market or growth-stage Bay Area company that doesn’t actually need 40 hours/week of network engineering, that’s the wrong allocation of headcount budget. Fractional engineering through a service relationship covers the same skill at a fraction of the run-rate.
Even when you can budget for a full-time senior network engineer, finding one in the Bay Area often takes 4–6 months. Recruiter fees, hiring manager time, candidate slate management, multi-round technical interviews, offer negotiations against competing offers. Service engagements don’t require any of that — you scope, contract, and start in weeks.
Even after the hire, retention is hard in the Bay Area. Competitors with bigger budgets recruit experienced network engineers. A service engagement doesn’t hinge on keeping one employee, and the diagrams, configs, and decision records stay with you.
Bay Area B2B SaaS, fintech, biotech, and healthcare-adjacent companies all live under continuous compliance scrutiny. Network controls show up on every audit and in every customer security questionnaire. We engineer the network with that scrutiny as the default lens, not as an add-on workstream when audit season arrives.
Engineering Work
Concrete deliverables, with fixed prices where the scope is defined. These are the kinds of network work we take on for Bay Area companies.
Inherited or accumulated network not performing? We redesign to a documented standard: two firewalls so one can fail without taking the office down (an HA pair), two paths from every switch back to the core, and separate lanes (VLANs) so a problem in one can’t reach the others. Diagrams, configs, and a change-staging plan that gets you from where you are to where you need to be without taking sites down.
SF HQ plus offices across the Peninsula, East Bay, and beyond, running ad-hoc configs that no one has documented. We standardize: same vendor, same config template, same monitoring. New sites become a documented playbook instead of a fire drill. Particularly valuable for companies that have grown through acquisition.
Moving from SonicWall to FortiGate, from Meraki to FortiAP, from a legacy MPLS to SD-WAN. Migration plans that minimize downtime, with rollback paths. Real engineer staging, testing, and cutover — not a vendor rep with a quote. Firewall migration starts at $6,500 for a FortiGate up to the 90-series class and $8,900 for 100F–200F or an HA pair; the assessment sets the fixed fee. Details on firewall migration services.
A complete review of your current network: configs, segmentation (which devices can reach which), drift (settings that changed site-to-site without anyone noticing), security posture, compliance gaps. Written report, network diagram and a 30-60-90 day plan, yours to keep whether or not you continue with us. $3,500 for a single small site, about two weeks; larger networks are priced on the assessment pricing page. Start here if you are evaluating an engineering relationship.
Bay Area B2B SaaS lives or dies on SOC 2 audit cycles and enterprise customer questionnaires. We produce the network-controls documentation auditors and customers actually want — segmentation diagrams, access control matrices, change-history evidence — in the format they expect. If you need the as-built first (the map of what is actually installed), start with a network audit at $1,250 per site.
Ongoing senior engineer availability during business hours, Mon–Fri, 8 AM–5 PM Pacific. Co-Managed Bench $1,720 per month with 8 engineering hours, Architecture Oversight $2,750 per month with 4 engineering hours (larger estates quoted after scoping), or Embedded Authority $7,200 per month with 24 engineering hours. Prepaid hour blocks bring the rate down to $195 an hour at 100 hours. Not on a retainer? Scheduled remote work is hourly, with a one-hour minimum: $225 standard technical labor, $325 specialized engineering, $350 architecture. Your internal team has someone to call when something breaks — and, on Architecture Oversight, a review of changes before they ship. If you already have an MSP, keep them: a co-managed network arrangement covers the network layer alongside them.
Service Area
On-site work and remote operations across the SF Bay Area — San Francisco proper, the Peninsula, East Bay, and South Bay.
Engineering operations are conducted across the Bay Area and remotely; on-site visits are scheduled as project work requires. We also work on site in San Jose and Sacramento: see network engineer in San Jose and network engineer in Sacramento.
Our Approach
No mystery. No black box. Every step is documented, explained, and approved before execution.
A Network Risk Assessment of your current network: about two weeks for a single small site, fixed price. Configurations reviewed, segmentation validated and gaps documented, in writing.
Address critical risks first, then build toward a standardized architecture. Every change documented, tested, and scheduled with a rollback plan.
Every device and link checked every minute, with alerts to Slack or Teams; a senior engineer responds Mon–Fri, 8 AM–5 PM Pacific. Config backup and change tracking, so changes can be rolled back and shown to an auditor. Plans from $695 per site per month. The network does not just work today — it evolves with your operations.
Your Engineer
No rotating technicians. No ticket queue. Whether it is a single troubleshooting call or ongoing network management, one named senior engineer is your point of contact and builds up knowledge of your environment, compliance requirements and business. You are never passed between people.
Background: Founder, ex-Meta. Past engagements include Cisco, Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae, and other Fortune 500 networks — the same caliber of engineering, now applied to mid-market organizations.
We are a Fortinet Engage Advocate partner and supply FortiGate, FortiSwitch and FortiAP. We also monitor and manage the Cisco, Aruba, Arista and other enterprise gear you already run. You don’t have to rip anything out to work with us.
Who Hires Us
Common shapes: B2B SaaS companies preparing for SOC 2 audits, multi-site businesses whose general MSP has hit a ceiling, growth-stage tech companies whose network was set up by a contractor years ago, and biotech/life-sciences firms with specialized lab-network requirements.
Growth-stage SaaS companies whose customer pipeline starts requiring SOC 2 or whose enterprise deals stall on security questionnaires. We take ownership of the network-controls portion: documentation, segmentation, evidence, audit prep. The work that auditors actually look at, done by an engineer with audit experience.
SF HQ plus offices across the Peninsula, East Bay, or nationally — with no documented network architecture and an internal team trying to keep up. We standardize, document, and operate. If you run two or more sites, the Multi-Site plan ($2,495 per month plus $995 per additional site) is built for exactly this: companies that grew by acquisition or geographic expansion without a network architecture investment.
Mission Bay, Genentech corridor, the Peninsula biotech belt — lab networks have unusual requirements: instrument-network isolation, validated environments, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, zero tolerance for downtime that disrupts long-running experiments. We design networks that meet those constraints without forcing your scientists to think about networking.
SF-based fintech and traditional financial services face PCI-DSS aligned network controls, audit-ready evidence, segregated cardholder data networks. Whether you’re a venture-backed fintech or an established asset manager in the Financial District, the network controls scrutiny is real.
Common Bay Area shape: $20M–$200M revenue tech company, internal IT person handling devices and Microsoft 365, no one with deep network engineering. We become the on-call network engineering function without you needing to recruit (which often takes 4–6 months) or fully replace your IT person.
SF is one of the largest legal markets in the country. Client-required security questionnaires, confidential matter data, segregated network paths for sensitive document handling. Architecture firms, engineering consultancies, accounting practices — same shape of need, same documentation discipline.
FAQ
A full-time senior network engineer in San Francisco costs an estimated $180k–$220k/year loaded (base salary plus benefits, tax and equipment), and recruiting one often takes 4–6 months. If you need 5–20 hours/month of network engineering, with the ability to surge during projects, you don’t need a 40-hour-a-week hire. Fractional senior engineering (part-time, on contract, no recruiting) gets the defined work done at a fraction of the cost.
If you are comparing MSP packages (help desk + monitoring + device management), you are comparison-shopping vendors. A network engineer engagement is different: you’re hiring a specific person with verifiable engineering credentials to do specific engineering work — redesign, project execution, on-call expertise. Closer to a contract architect than a service vendor. If what you want is the monthly plan, see our San Francisco MSP page: plans from $695 per site per month.
A typical engagement starts with a Network Risk Assessment ($3,500 for a single small site, fixed fee, with a written report; larger networks are priced by size on our assessment pricing page). From there: either a defined-scope project (redesign, migration, multi-site rollout) or a monthly managed plan (from $695 per site per month). Some clients keep the assessment, fix the issues themselves, and only re-engage on specific projects later. That’s a fine outcome too.
Yes. Your IT person or general MSP keeps doing what they do (help desk, Microsoft 365, devices, etc.). We handle the network engineering layer they can’t cover at depth. Communication paths get defined up front so we’re not stepping on each other.
Cisco Certified, Fortinet Certified, CompTIA Certified. 20+ years of network-only practice. Past Fortune 500 enterprise engagements. Fortinet Engage Advocate Partner. Verifiable certifications, real engineering background — not a generalist with a Fortinet partner badge.
Direct. We produce the network-controls documentation auditors and enterprise customers actually want — segmentation diagrams, access control matrices, change-history evidence — in the format they expect. If you are in continuous SOC 2 audit cycles plus quarterly customer questionnaires, we make the network-controls portions of those reviews straightforward.
Start the Engagement
One senior engineer’s review, one written report, one set of prioritized recommendations. Whether you bring us in for the project that follows or not, the assessment becomes a real working document for you. The fastest way to get a senior network engineer’s eyes on your environment. $3,500 for a single small site; larger networks are priced on the assessment pricing page. See a sample report (PDF).
Response from a senior engineer within 1 business day.
A direct conversation — no sales team, no runaround.
An honest assessment of whether we are the right fit.
Clear next steps if we are — no pressure if we are not.
