Network Engineer (MSP) - Early Shift, Maintenance + Helpdesk, Work From Home

We are a managed services provider (MSP) in San Diego, California, hiring 2 network engineers in the Philippines. Full-time, work-from-home, long-term. I have run this business for 30 years and I am the owner.

READ THIS FIRST SO YOU APPLY TO THE RIGHT JOB

This is NOT our senior engineer role. We have a separate post for a Level 3 Senior Network Engineer - if you are already a deep senior troubleshooter, apply to that one instead.

This role is for the engineer who is genuinely good today and wants to be trained into great. You will be trained by one of our senior engineers. There is a real path from this seat to the senior seat, and we would much rather promote you than hire a stranger later.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

This is not a guess. It is the work our US engineers do right now, and it is the seat you would fill.

5:00 AM to 8:00 AM San Diego (8:00 PM to 11:00 PM Manila) - THE QUIET HOURS. The maintenance queue in ConnectWise. Nobody is calling, nothing is on fire, and you work a list:

- Servers and workstations low on disk space. Find what is eating it, clean it up properly, note what you did.
- Patching that needs a second look, and reboots that never completed.
- Monitoring alerts to clear or escalate: an agent that stopped checking in, a service that keeps stopping.
- Backup jobs to verify. A backup nobody checked is not a backup.
- The recurring housekeeping that quietly keeps a lot of client systems healthy.

One of our engineers does almost exactly this full time today. It is the best way to learn every client we have before anybody depends on you live.

8:00 AM San Diego (11:00 PM Manila) - 15-minute stand-up on Microsoft Teams. You tell the team what you cleared overnight.

8:00 AM to 2:00 PM - HELPDESK. Live tickets with the rest of the team:

- Workstation problems: Windows 10 and 11, software that will not install, machines that crawl.
- Printers and scanners. Yes, really. Every MSP lives here.
- Outlook and Microsoft 365: mail flow, shared mailboxes, calendar permissions, licensing.
- New user setups, offboarding, password and MFA resets.
- Mapped drives, permissions, file access.
- Talking to real people who are frustrated and need you calm and clear.

WHAT YOU WILL NOT DO: go onsite. Anything physical - swapping hardware, running cable, standing in a server room - stays with our US engineers. Everything you do is remote.

WHAT WE USE

ConnectWise, Kaseya, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, Active Directory, backup tools, firewalls, Hudu for documentation, and more. You do not need to know all of it - know enough to be useful on day one and be eager to learn the rest.

THE PERSON WE WANT

- Reliable. If you say you will do something, it gets done.
- Teachable. You would rather be corrected than be right.
- Good with people. Most of our clients are not technical and are often frustrated when they reach us. How you make them feel matters as much as the fix.
- Organized. Maintenance work rewards someone who works a list properly instead of skipping around.
- Writes things down. Everything we learn goes into Hudu, our knowledge base, and you will lean on it constantly while learning our clients' systems. As you grow, you go from reading those articles to writing them. Helping the next engineer succeed is part of the job, not something extra.

ABOUT US

Completely virtual, and we genuinely like each other. Whoever we add has to fit that:

- Good vibes
- Hard working
- Customer caring
- Friendly
- Open to suggestions, easy communication
- Most of us really love music and chat about fun things on our Microsoft Teams board
- Willing to share your technical opinion on how to fix something

THE SCHEDULE - READ THIS TWICE

- 5:00 AM to 2:00 PM San Diego time, Monday to Friday.
- In Manila that is 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM in the US summer, 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM in the US winter. Our clocks shift twice a year, yours do not.
- You finish before sunrise and your whole Manila day is free.

Yes, this is a night shift in the Philippines. We are upfront about it because we are hiring for many years, not many weeks.

TALK TO OUR PHILIPPINE TEA ---------- MBER BEFORE YOU D ----------

We already have an employee in the Philippines who has been with us 3 to 4 years. Once we are far enough along, we will put you in touch with her privately so you can ask her anything about working for us. It is hard to judge a foreign employer from a job post - ask her instead of taking our word for it.

ALSO IMPORTANT

- Be on camera for the 15-minute stand-up at 8:00 AM San Diego, every working day.
- Log your time every day.
- You need extremely reliable internet and computer, plus a backup plan when power or internet goes out.
- Your English must be good, spoken as well as written, because you will talk to American clients.

PAY

1,400 to 2,200 USD per month, based on experience and English. As you grow into more senior work, your pay grows with it.

HOW TO APPLY - THIS IS PART OF THE TEST

1. Put "California Dreaming" in your subject line, along with your name.

2. Attach your resume.

3. Attach a voice recording - WAV or MP3 - reading this question out loud and then answering it:
"Tell me about a time you had to explain something technical to a frustrated customer who did not understand it. What did you say, and how did it end?"
Two to three minutes is plenty. No ZIP or RAR files. Applications without a voice recording will not be reviewed - we do this so we do not waste your time or ours on a call that was never going to work.

4. One line: can you work 5:00 AM to 2:00 PM San Diego time, five days a week, long term? Yes or no.

OUR PROCESS

Stage 1 - these questions and your voice recording.
Stage 2 - a skills conversation on Microsoft Teams, 30 to 90 minutes.
Stage 3 - a hands-on test in a live environment, and we pay you for your time.

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom : )

# network engineer # helpdesk # connectwise # kaseya # msp