Lead Network & Systems Engineer (m/f)

You think in packets and processes, and you are already the person your team comes to when something is badly broken, usually with a theory before they finish explaining.

What we need is a force multiplier: someone senior enough to own architecture and carry projects without supervision, steady enough to hold a team to a standard, and sure-footed enough to sit across from the country's major carriers and our implementation partners without needing backup. We design, build, and operate infrastructure for clients in enterprise and ISP environments across several key industries, and on the R&D side we build our own products. There is more real engineering here than one person can hold, and another pair of junior hands would not change that.

Within your assigned scope the work is yours to run: systems architecture, the projects on your plate, the engineers on them, and the implementation partners you deal with directly. You report to the technical director and president, who is in the engineering every day by choice, alongside customer meetings and product development. Major decisions stay at that level. Everything below it is yours, which makes this a load-bearing position with real technical and team responsibility.

The autonomy comes with one expectation: be a direct extension. Surface what is worth seeing early, a risk building on a project, a client remark that changes the picture, a design worth a second pair of eyes. Reporting is event-driven rather than calendar-driven, so nobody carves your day into check-in windows you cannot think between. The same directness runs toward the team: keep them unblocked, hold the standard, leave people room to grow. You lead by example, not by standing above them.

Expect to be on the road. The work runs the length of the country, from Luzon through the Visayas to Mindanao, and it usually reaches us only after it has outgrown the client's own team. Clients bring us in as the technical authority on the hard problems, which means whatever we hand back has to be properly engineered and still standing years later, not patched and propped up.

There is an internal lab, and it is not decorative: routers, switches, servers, and embedded gear we use every day. If you want to prove something out before it goes anywhere near a client site, the hardware is already on the bench, and when something is missing there is a good chance we will buy it.

This is an on-site role, and after your first year, once it's working well on both sides, a hybrid arrangement is open for discussion. Compensation is merit-based, like everything else here: you are paid for what you actually bring, starting with attitude, loyalty, and care for the team, and then for skill and output. Further out, for someone who stays and keeps building with us, ownership in the company is a conversation we are open to having. That is not a promise to make on a job page, but it is real, and it would be earned the same way.

Requirements

• 5+ years in network and/or systems engineering, owning projects end to end: scope it, build it, document it, hand it over
• Hands-on experience across ISP, enterprise, and data center environments
• A track record of running work without supervision, and of raising the standard of the engineers around you
• Networking: IPv4 and IPv6, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, MPLS, VLANs, DNS, DHCP, firewalls, and packet captures, plus production routers, switches, access points, and network operating systems on white label or bare metal (OcNOS, VyOS). Greenfield builds here are IPv6-first
• Fiber and outside plant: route design, protected path selection, aerial and underground OSP builds, splicing and OTDR acceptance, optics selection, and link and power budgets
• Structured cabling and data centers: TIA/EIA and ISO/IEC standards, terminations, labeling, acceptance testing, cabinets and containment, power and cooling, and cross-connects
• Carrier and vendor dealings: coordination, equipment selection, stakeholder updates, and TAC cases driven to resolution instead of left open
• Linux and the CLI: systemd, networking stack, logs, permissions, performance tuning, hardening
• Mail systems in production: SMTP and IMAP, authentication and deliverability (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, rDNS)
• Virtualization, containers, and storage: hypervisors and clustering (Proxmox VE, KVM/QEMU), containers (Docker, Podman), and storage with restores you have actually tested (ZFS, LVM, NFS/iSCSI)
• Automation and infrastructure-as-code: Bash, Python, Ansible, plus the basics of Kubernetes and Terraform/OpenTofu
• AI-assisted engineering and a real appetite for new technology: you try things, you keep current, and you can still explain and stand behind every line that ships
• Fluent English, a valid Philippine driver's license, and ready for frequent travel across the country

Nice to Have

• Lab-examined certifications, if you have them: JNCIE, CCIE, RHCSA/RHCE, CKA, OSCP, KLCP. The ones you cannot cram for
• A name in the industry: open-source contributions, published tooling, technical writing, or an active community presence
• Monitoring and observability: Grafana, Prometheus, and custom stacks built from scratch
• Self-hosted LLM stacks (Ollama, vLLM) and immutable Linux (NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, Project Bluefin)
• Strong opinions about your editor, shell, and distro, with the reasoning to match