Lead Network Engineer, Thaltej (SG Highway) — Ahmedabad
A company based in Thaltej, along SG Highway in Ahmedabad, is hiring a full-time, on-site Lead Network Engineer. This role requires eight years of hands-on networking experience, and it carries real ownership of how the company's network is built, monitored, and kept running.
The network spans several office floors and a handful of connected sites, and problems often show up in ways that don't immediately point to their cause. A dropped VPN connection might actually trace back to a misconfigured firewall rule from weeks earlier that only started causing trouble once traffic patterns shifted. Sorting out that kind of delayed, indirect failure is a regular part of the job, more so than dealing with something that fails obviously the moment it breaks.
Core responsibilities include:
- Configuring and maintaining network hardware across office and connected sites
- Troubleshooting connectivity issues as they're reported or detected through monitoring
- Monitoring network performance and security on an ongoing basis
- Planning network capacity ahead of expected growth in staff or connected sites
Required skills for this role include a strong grasp of TCP/IP and other core networking protocols, hands-on routing and switching experience, working knowledge of firewalls, and real troubleshooting ability under pressure, not just familiarity from documentation. Someone who can walk through a network outage they personally diagnosed, including the wrong turns taken before finding the actual cause, tends to interview well for a role at this level. A few additional skills would strengthen an application without being required: exposure to SD-WAN deployments, scripting with Python or using Ansible for network automation, and a higher-level certification such as CCIE for candidates who already hold something like CCNA or CCNP.
A bachelor's degree is the baseline education requirement. Electronics or computer science lines up most closely with the technical grounding this role assumes, though the company has hired people with other engineering backgrounds when their networking experience was strong enough to make up the difference. A recognized networking certification, CCNA or CCNP being the most common, is expected alongside the degree at this level, since it signals a certain baseline of formal knowledge that pairs with the hands-on experience the role also requires.
Pay for this position runs up to ₹154,000 a month, on-site, full-time, positioned at the senior end of what network engineer jobs in Ahmedabad tend to pay. Benefits attached to the role include:
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Performance-linked bonuses
- On-site cafeteria access and cab or commute support
Thaltej has grown into a fairly established commercial stretch along SG Highway, with a mix of corporate offices and IT companies clustered in the same general area. Naukri Mitra has listed a handful of senior networking roles from this part of Ahmedabad over the past year, and this one sits toward the top of that range given the experience and certification expectations attached to it.
This role reports to the head of IT infrastructure and carries decision-making authority over network architecture choices rather than sitting in a purely supporting function. Junior network staff bring proposed changes to this person before anything gets pushed to production hardware, so the job includes a fair amount of review and mentoring alongside hands-on configuration work.
On-call coverage is part of the role, roughly one week in four, and a network-wide outage during that window takes priority over everything else scheduled for the day. Most weeks pass without anything urgent, and the company treats the on-call expectation as a normal feature of the seniority attached to this position, not an unusual ask.
Interviews typically start with a technical round covering real network design and troubleshooting scenarios, followed by a conversation with the head of IT infrastructure about how the candidate has handled past outages or capacity planning decisions. Someone who can speak concretely about a network they've actually scaled or a failure they've actually fixed usually stands out more than someone reciting protocol definitions from memory.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and given the specificity of the experience and certification requirements, the process tends to move faster than it does for more junior openings. Candidates currently outside Ahmedabad should mention that early, since it shapes how the conversation around logistics and compensation gets handled going forward.
The network runs mostly on Cisco hardware, with a mix of older switches still in service alongside newer equipment brought in over the past couple of years as the company expanded. Part of the job involves deciding which aging devices are worth replacing now versus keeping running a while longer, a call that depends as much on how critical a given segment is as on the hardware's actual age. That kind of prioritization comes up more often at this level than most people expect before stepping into a lead role.
Security sits alongside performance as a standing concern rather than a separate project. Firewall rule reviews, VPN access audits, and monitoring for unusual traffic patterns all fall under this position, and getting one of those wrong doesn't always cause an immediate, visible problem. Sometimes a gap in access control sits quietly until something exploits it months later, which is why ongoing review matters as much as initial setup.
There isn't a formal management track tied to this role, but the lead engineer here has real say in how the broader IT infrastructure team gets staffed and organized as the company grows. A previous person in a similar lead position moved into a regional infrastructure manager role after about two years, which gives some sense of where this kind of experience can lead without promising a specific path for every hire.
Ahmedabad's IT corridor along SG Highway has expanded steadily, and networking roles at this seniority have become more competitive to fill as more companies set up regional operations here rather than centralizing everything in bigger metro hubs. That shift has pushed pay for experienced network engineers upward over the past few years, and this role's compensation reflects where that trend currently sits.
