San Jose Network Engineer · Senior, On Call
Not every South Bay or Silicon Valley business needs a full-time network engineer — but when you need one, you need a real one. Cisco-certified, Fortinet-certified, 20+ years of network-only practice. Available for design, redesign, troubleshooting, multi-site operations, and ongoing engineering retainer. Serving San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Milpitas, and the broader South Bay. Start with a fixed-price Network Risk Assessment from $3,500; the report is yours to keep.
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.
One senior engineer, start to finish. 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
In Silicon Valley the gap between needing a network engineer and hiring one is expensive: a full-time senior network engineer in San Jose runs $170k–$210k loaded, plus six-month recruiting cycles in a market where senior engineers field competing offers. 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 Silicon Valley organizations. Verifiable, not "we have a guy."
FortiGate firewalls, Cisco Catalyst switching, Aruba/Cisco wireless, Juniper SRX, Arista 7000 series. Multi-vendor environments are the norm in real Silicon Valley businesses, particularly hardware-adjacent companies and those that have absorbed legacy infrastructure. Your engineer should be able to work in whatever you actually have.
Three engagement modes: Project (network redesign, multi-site rollout, vendor migration — defined scope, fixed timeline); Retainer (Co-Managed Bench, Architecture Oversight or Embedded Authority, or prepaid hour blocks); Network Risk Assessment (one-time assessment, written report, fixed price from $3,500). Pick whichever fits your situation.
If your enterprise deals stall on customer security questionnaires or SOC 2 (a third-party audit of your security controls), the network is part of what gets checked. 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 to close enterprise deals.
Silicon Valley Hiring Market Context
Silicon Valley senior network engineering hires compete against FAANG and venture-backed companies offering stock-based comp packages. A mid-market company without stock to offer is at a disadvantage in that market even when it pays strong cash. Service engagements sidestep the comp competition entirely; the relationship is built around projects and deliverables rather than retention against competing offers.
Hiring an engineer to evaluate engineers is its own challenge. Silicon Valley IT directors and VPs of Engineering evaluating network engineering candidates are themselves senior technical people whose time is expensive. A 4–6 month hiring cycle eats meaningful technical-leader bandwidth. Service engagements bypass that entirely — the same technical leader spends an hour in scoping conversation and the engagement starts.
Silicon Valley networks include validated environments, instrument-network isolation, pre-release IP-handling, and lab traffic with specialized requirements. Engineers with that experience are hard to hire at mid-market scale. If you can’t fund that hire, bringing one in on a project or retainer gets you the expertise without the search.
If your South Bay B2B SaaS runs continuous SOC 2 audit cycles plus quarterly customer security questionnaires, network controls are scrutinized at every iteration. We document every network change as evidence as we go, so an audit or a customer questionnaire is a file you open, not a project you start.
Engineering Work
Concrete deliverables, not vague "managed services." These are the work types South Bay clients engage us for.
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), a core with no single point of failure, each switch connected two ways, and separate lanes so a problem in one department can’t reach the others (segmentation). Diagrams, configs, and a change-staging plan that gets you from where you are to where you need to be without taking sites down.
San Jose HQ plus Mountain View R&D, Santa Clara warehouse, Fremont satellite — 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. If you run two or more sites, the multi-site Fortinet MSP plan ($2,495 per month plus $995 per additional site) runs that standard for you. Particularly valuable for hardware-adjacent companies with mixed office and lab footprints.
Moving from SonicWall to FortiGate, from Meraki to FortiAP, from a legacy MPLS to SD-WAN. Firewall migration starts at $6,500 up to a 90-series-class firewall and $8,900 for 100F–200F or an HA pair; the assessment sets the fixed fee. Migration plans that minimize downtime, with rollback paths. Real engineer staging, testing, and cutover — not a vendor rep with a quote.
A complete review of your current network: configurations, segmentation, drift (settings that changed without anyone noticing), security posture, compliance gaps. Written report, prioritized recommendations, yours to keep regardless of whether you continue with us. Fixed price from $3,500 for a single small site, about two weeks; larger networks are priced on the assessment pricing page.
For South Bay B2B SaaS, SOC 2 audit cycles and enterprise customer questionnaires come with the territory. We produce the network-controls documentation auditors and customers actually want — segmentation diagrams, access control matrices, change-history evidence — in the format they expect.
Ongoing senior engineer availability, 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. Otherwise, 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 would rather have automated monitoring with business-hours engineer response, managed plans start at $695 per site per month.
Service Area
On-site work and remote operations across San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and the broader South Bay.
If your South Bay business operates with offices across the broader Bay Area — or your HQ is in Silicon Valley with branches elsewhere — remote-managed network operations work the same way. We also work as a San Francisco network engineer and Sacramento network engineer.
Our Approach
No mystery. No black box. Every step is documented, explained, and approved before execution.
A complete 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.
Ongoing network monitoring, change management, and architectural review. The network does not just work today — it evolves with your operations.
Your Engineer
No rotating technicians. No ticket queue. From a first design review through multi-site operations, one named senior engineer is your point of contact and knows your environment, your compliance requirements and your business context. You never re-explain your network to a new technician.
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 preparing for SOC 2, hardware companies with mixed lab+office networks, growth-stage tech companies whose network was built ad-hoc, and biotech 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.
Engineering-design networks, validated environments, isolated test labs, secure handling of pre-release hardware and IP, and the kind of segmentation that keeps a customer’s tape-out data separate from corporate traffic. From mid-market chip design firms to growth-stage hardware companies in the Santa Clara / San Jose corridor.
San Jose HQ, Mountain View R&D office, Santa Clara warehouse, Fremont satellite — we standardize the architecture across every site. Same vendor, same config, same monitoring. Reduces the cost-of-incident and makes opening new sites a documented process.
The South Bay has substantial biotech and life-sciences presence — specialty firms and growth-stage companies adjacent to the Stanford / SLAC ecosystem. 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.
Common Silicon Valley 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 would take 6 months in this market) or fully replace your IT person.
South Bay legal firms, IP-focused firms, and professional services consultancies face client-required security questionnaires, confidential matter data, and segregated network paths for sensitive document handling. Same shape of need, same documentation discipline.
FAQ
A loaded full-time senior network engineer in San Jose runs $170k–$210k/year, plus 6-month recruiting cycles in a market where senior engineers field competing offers. 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 at a monthly retainer gets the defined work done at a fraction of the cost.
If you are comparing MSP packages (help desk + monitoring + device management), you are choosing a vendor; our San Jose MSP page covers the managed network plans, from $695 per site per month. Hiring a network engineer 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.
Start with a Network Risk Assessment ($3,500 for a single small site, fixed fee, about two weeks, 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 engineering retainer (Co-Managed Bench, Architecture Oversight or Embedded Authority) or prepaid hour blocks. 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. See how co-managed network services work.
Cisco Certified, Fortinet Certified, CompTIA Certified. 20+ years of network-only practice. Past Fortune 500 enterprise engagements. Fortinet Engage Advocate Partner (see our San Jose Fortinet partner page). Verifiable certifications, real engineering background — not a generalist with a Fortinet partner badge.
Directly. 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.
