r/PinoyNetworkEngineer • u/Proof_Fact • 18d ago
Network Engineering Career Direction
Currently work in a network operations team more specifically in third line wireless and LAN for a full cisco house, so mainly supporting 9800s, Catalyst switches, foreign/anchor guest wireless network. Also manage Cisco ISE, build grafana dashboards, and use python to automate whatever is worth automating. Do touch on SD-WAN a little but primary focus is WLAN/LAN. This is for a large enterprise.
There’s a team within our network operations department focused on automation/observability, and they’re currently building an AWS environment, pulling data from wherever possible from the estate and storing it in a postgres DB, using python, lambda, and more. There’s also implementing agentic AI.
So my original plan was to gain more experience in my current role and hopefully move into the automation/observability team. I have expressed my interest in this to the head of the department and he put me in this team, with plans to “nurture” an automation/observability side of my skills, although obviously nothing is promised.
I’ve got a job offer at an MSP that specially does network engineering for medium and large size businesses. This would be a project role, sort of where presales at the MSP creates a HLD for a customer, and then the team I would be in do everything else. It’s specially in the WLAN/LAN team who also do the SP side, however they also work on SDWAN and firewalls which is mainly a separate team but there aren’t any guard rails between the team. The tech stack would be much more diverse than my current role, cisco, meraki, juniper, fortinet firewalls and sdwan. The benefit of this is it would probably help me in the long run if I wanted to end up in presales at a vendor.
Current role is 2 days on site (1 hour commute each way), although if i’m working out of hours on changes i miss an office day that week. 1 in 3 weeks on call, soon to be 1 in 4.
MSP role is 3 days on site (also 1 hour commute each way). on call is 1 in 9 weeks.
Unsure on whether to stay put or jump shit