WiFi Network Engineer (Onsite Contract)

Job Description

Job Description

OVERVIEW

Our client is a global financial technology company headquartered in Seattle, operating in cross-border digital payments and money movement. The organization serves millions of customers across international corridors and supports a hybrid workforce spread across offices worldwide. In-office collaboration is central to how their engineering, product, and operations teams work, which makes reliable office connectivity a direct input to daily productivity.

• Pay Rate: $100 - $115/hr DOE
• Duraction: 3 Weeks or until project completion
• Location: Seattle, WA (Onsite)

About the Engagement

The client's Seattle office is experiencing intermittent wireless performance problems that have resisted standard troubleshooting. Symptoms are inconsistent and difficult to reproduce on demand, which has made root cause identification the primary obstacle rather than remediation itself.

This is a focused three-week engagement for a wireless specialist who can walk into an existing HPE Aruba environment, establish a disciplined diagnostic baseline, isolate the underlying cause with evidence, and hand back a documented fix or remediation plan. The work calls for someone who has spent real time inside difficult RF and client-side problems and knows how to separate correlation from causation.

Environment

• HPE Aruba Networking wireless infrastructure - access points, controllers and gateways
• HPE Aruba Networking Central as the cloud control plane
• Aruba switching supporting the wired distribution and PoE layer
• Enterprise authentication across a mixed client population including macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android endpoints

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Establish a diagnostic baseline for the Seattle office wireless environment within the first days of the engagement, including current RF conditions, client density, channel utilization, and error rates.
• Use HPE Aruba Networking Central telemetry - AI Insights, client and connectivity analytics, live event data, and RF dashboards - to identify patterns behind the intermittent behavior.
• Conduct spectrum analysis and validation surveys to identify interference sources, coverage gaps, co-channel contention, and DFS or radar-driven channel changes.
• Perform packet-level analysis of association, authentication, and roaming behavior to isolate client-side versus infrastructure-side failure points.
• Evaluate AP placement, power and channel plans, band steering, airtime fairness, and roaming configuration against observed usage patterns.
• Validate the supporting services that wireless depends on, including DHCP scope health, DNS resolution, RADIUS and certificate-based authentication response times, VLAN and forwarding mode configuration, PoE budget, and multicast or mDNS behavior.
• Assess AP and controller firmware levels against known defects and advisories, and recommend upgrade paths where relevant.
• Implement approved changes under the client's change management process, then measure and confirm the result rather than assuming it.
• Deliver written findings, root cause evidence, remediation actions taken, and recommendations for ongoing monitoring and alerting so the internal team can sustain the environment after the engagement closes.
• Communicate status and findings clearly to both network peers and non-technical stakeholders throughout the three weeks.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Five or more years of hands-on enterprise wireless engineering experience in multi-AP corporate office environments.
• Deep production experience with HPE Aruba Networking wireless infrastructure, including access points, controllers or gateways, and Aruba OS.
• Working proficiency in HPE Aruba Networking Central, including its analytics, insights, live event tooling, and RF optimization capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose intermittent and hard-to-reproduce wireless issues, with examples of problems you isolated and resolved.
• Strong command of 802.11 standards and behavior, including 802.11ac, 802.11ax, roaming standards such as 802.11k, 802.11v, and 802.11r, channel planning, DFS behavior, and RF fundamentals.
• Hands-on spectrum analysis and survey experience with tools such as Ekahau, NetAlly, or equivalent.
• Packet capture and analysis skills, including wireless frame analysis in Wireshark or comparable tooling.
• Practical knowledge of the services wireless depends on: DHCP, DNS, VLANs, PoE, RADIUS, WPA2 and WPA3 Enterprise, EAP-TLS, and certificate lifecycle issues.
• Experience troubleshooting client-side wireless behavior across a mixed macOS, Windows, and mobile fleet.
• Ability to work onsite in Seattle for the duration of the engagement and to operate independently with limited ramp-up time.

Preferred Qualifications

• Aruba certifications such as ACMP, ACMX, ACCP, or ACCX.
• CWNA, CWAP, or CWNE certification.
• Experience with Aruba ClearPass or AirWave.
• Prior work in financial services, fintech, or another regulated environment with formal change control requirements.
• Experience troubleshooting real-time collaboration traffic - video conferencing and voice - over wireless, including QoS and application-layer impact.

Engagement Success Criteria

• Root cause of the wireless degradation identified and supported by evidence.
• Remediation implemented where feasible within the engagement window, or a prioritized and actionable plan delivered where changes extend beyond it.
• Documentation handed to the internal team covering findings, configuration changes, and recommended monitoring so the environment can be maintained going forward.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other non-merit factor. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment for all employees.