Role brief
Job description
Are you a hands-on enterprise network engineer — Level 3 / Tier 3 support, network operations, or the person your team escalates to — interested in data science and autonomous infrastructure? Our client is building vertically integrated networking systems and using the data they generate to power the next generation of AI-driven infrastructure. They're looking for engineers experienced in troubleshooting, escalations, packet analysis and RCA workflows to help label, annotate, and structure networking data from real production systems.
This is a hands-on role that blends your troubleshooting and incident-response experience with a growing understanding of how data pipelines are built and used in AI systems.
**About this talent network**
This is an ongoing talent network rather than a single open vacancy. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and interview rounds run periodically as the client opens new headcount. Completing the technical practicum now means your profile is ready to be put forward as soon as the next round opens — there's no need to reapply later.
**In this role, you'll:**
– Review real-world data from deployed networks: logs, configs, telemetry, event streams
– Label and classify network behaviors, issues, anomalies, and incident patterns
– Help define schemas and structure for large-scale data pipelines that downstream ML models will train on
**Must have:**
– Hands-on experience operating enterprise production networks — switches, access points and firewalls — in end-customer environments such as retail, healthcare, financial, manufacturing, university or hospitality
– At least 5 years of experience in network engineering, network operations or network support roles
– Currently, or most recently, working in a hands-on network engineering, network operations or network support role
**Strongly preferred:**
– Experience as an escalation point for network incidents — Tier 3, final escalations, on-call rotation, RCAs, troubleshooting outages
– Hands-on enterprise Wi-Fi — WLAN controllers (Cisco WLC/9800, Aruba, or Meraki), 802.1X / RADIUS, and wireless troubleshooting
– Packet-level troubleshooting you do yourself — Wireshark, tcpdump, SPAN captures
– Exposure to a wide variety of network environments, vendors and customer types — whether through an MSP, VAR or systems integrator, or a single enterprise with a genuinely diverse estate
– Networks operated across multiple sites or a large campus environment
– Curiosity about how raw infrastructure data becomes machine learning input
This is a **maintainer** role — likely not the right fit if your current work is mainly network design/architecture, cloud/SRE, security/SOC, or IT helpdesk.
Your work will directly feed into the pipelines that power client's AI models, and help shape how intelligent systems reason about networks in the real world.
**Here are more details about the role:**
– You will interface directly with the client team.
– You are expected to work 30-40 hours/week, with your hours overlapping the Pacific (PT) business day.
– This is an individual 1099 contract paid to a personal account — no corp-to-corp or agency billing.
– You must be authorized to work in the US or Canada without sponsorship. Please note this project cannot accommodate F-1 STEM OPT, as Mercor is unable to sign Form I-983. Standard F-1 OPT is fine.