Senior Cisco Wireless Network Engineer / Consultant
Employment Type: Contract / Project Based
Compensation: $110 to $150 per hour, based on experience
Location: Remote with occasional onsite work in the South Jersey / Philadelphia region
About the Role
We are looking for a senior Cisco Wireless Network Engineer with deep hands on experience designing, configuring, and migrating large enterprise wireless environments.
This role is focused heavily on Cisco Catalyst 9800 Wireless LAN Controllers and migrations from legacy AireOS platforms such as the Cisco 8540.
The ideal candidate has worked in large, business critical environments where wireless voice, roaming, high availability, RF performance, and minimal downtime are essential.
Responsibilities:
- Review and validate Cisco Catalyst 9800 configurations before production deployment.
- Provide recommendations for WLANs, policy profiles, policy tags, site tags, RF tags, RF profiles, AP profiles, RADIUS, VLANs, QoS, and authentication.
- Evaluate legacy AireOS configurations and determine which settings should be migrated, redesigned, or eliminated.
- Review RF settings including transmit power, channel width, data rates, RSSI, SNR, roaming, channel utilization, and Radio Resource Management.
- Validate wireless voice configuration and roaming behavior.
- Review and assist with Catalyst 9800 HA SSO configuration.
- Develop migration, testing, validation, rollback, and troubleshooting procedures.
- Provide guidance for minimizing service disruption during large scale wireless migrations.
- Clearly explain technical recommendations and the reasoning behind them.
Required Experience:
- Candidates should have at least 8 years of enterprise networking experience with significant specialization in wireless.
- Extensive hands on experience with Cisco Catalyst 9800 controllers is required.
- Candidates must have personally participated in migrations from Cisco AireOS controllers such as the 5508, 5520, or 8540 to Catalyst 9800.
- Strong knowledge of RF design, roaming, QoS, wireless voice, 802.11k, 802.11v, 802.11r, RADIUS, 802.1X, enterprise authentication, HA SSO, and Cisco RRM is required.
- Experience supporting large environments with hundreds or thousands of access points is strongly preferred.
- Candidates should be comfortable working in 24/7 production environments where downtime must be carefully controlled.
Preferred Experience:
- Experience with Cisco wireless phones, Cisco ISE, Catalyst Center, Ekahau, Hamina, AirMagnet, Wi Fi 6/6E, RTLS, location services, predictive wireless design, spectrum analysis, and post deployment wireless surveys is highly desirable.
- Healthcare, public safety, education, or other mission critical wireless experience is a plus.
- CCIE Wireless, CCNP Wireless, CWNE, CWAP, CWDP, or Ekahau certifications are preferred but not required if the candidate has significant real world Catalyst 9800 experience.
Ideal Candidate:
- We are looking for a true wireless specialist rather than a general network engineer who occasionally works with Wi Fi.
- The right candidate should be able to review an existing configuration, identify risks, challenge inappropriate defaults, and explain exactly why a different approach should be taken.
- You should be comfortable collaborating with experienced network engineers and providing clear, decisive technical guidance.
Applying
Please include the largest Cisco wireless environment you have personally supported, approximate AP count, controller models, and your role.
Also describe any AireOS to Catalyst 9800 migrations you have completed and your experience with wireless voice, HA SSO, Cisco ISE, RF design, and wireless surveys.