How to hire a IT Infrastructure and Networking team

Hiring guidance

Start with the scope

Building an infrastructure team requires balancing immediate stability against future scaling needs. Hiring your first network hire is a choice between a generalist who maintains basic connectivity or an engineer who builds for growth. Start with a core Network Engineer who handles routing, switching, and firewall configuration. If your business depends on uptime, this person acts as your primary defender against outages. Infrastructure needs evolve predictably once you reach a certain headcount. A Systems Administrator provides the foundation for user access and basic hardware management. As you move past fifty employees, you shift focus toward specialized roles like Microsoft 365 or Linux engineers. These roles manage the service layer rather than just the physical layer.

Scope boundaries often bleed between roles. A Network Engineer manages your data flow, but if you do not have a separate VoIP engineer, the network engineer will eventually take on voice traffic responsibilities. Define the boundary between a Systems Engineer and a DevOps role clearly. If your infrastructure team spends their entire day fixing individual laptop issues, they are functioning as support, not infrastructure engineers. A true infrastructure engineer focuses on systemic changes that reduce the total number of support tickets. If you hire a senior engineer for a role focused on manual patching, you will deal with retention issues quickly. Match the seniority of the hire to the complexity of the architectural debt you currently carry.

Hiring guidance

Network Topology Reasoning

Ask candidates to explain the path a data packet takes from a local workstation to a specific cloud service. Look for candidates who identify specific bottlenecks like latency at the ISP level, internal switch congestion, or firewall inspection delays. Weak answers involve vague statements about the internet being slow or guessing hardware models without explaining the underlying protocol flow.

Hiring guidance

Change Management Discipline

Inquire about a time they caused a production outage. A strong hire explains the exact configuration error, the immediate mitigation steps, and the specific documentation updates they created to ensure it never recurs. Avoid candidates who blame equipment, vendors, or external factors entirely. You need people who accept technical accountability for configuration changes.

Hiring guidance

Automated Deployment Logic

Ask them to describe their process for deploying updates to a large fleet of virtual machines or endpoints. Successful candidates explain how they use scripting or tools like Intune or Jamf to verify the update on a small subset before a global push. If they manually log into every machine to verify status, they lack the skills required for an efficient infrastructure environment.

Hiring guidance

System Integration Depth

Evaluate their understanding of how storage, compute, and networking intersect. A Senior Network Engineer should explain how a lack of bandwidth affects storage replication traffic. Good candidates discuss actual throughput testing or protocol monitoring. Weak candidates focus only on the physical installation of cables or the static setup of a specific vendor appliance.

Hiring guidance

Vendor and Credential Reality

Certifications like CCNA or VMware VCP provide proof that a person understands the foundational principles of a specific platform. However, these do not verify an ability to solve real-world problems in your unique environment. Use certifications as a baseline for literacy, but require proof of experience in managing high-availability clusters or complex routing tables.

Hiring guidance

Evidence to bring into the hiring conversation

Look for talent in companies that operate high-uptime environments such as logistics, manufacturing, or financial services. These environments force engineers to prioritize reliability over trendy features. Seek backgrounds that involve migrating legacy infrastructure to cloud-hybrid models, as this indicates a history of managing complex transitions without creating downtime.

Motivation for infrastructure engineers usually centers on building systems that require little manual intervention. Look for candidates who describe their work in terms of reduced ticket volume and improved system performance. Avoid engineers who focus solely on playing with the latest hardware unless they can explain how that hardware directly provides better service delivery for your specific business requirements.

Hiring guidance

Problems worth catching early

Hiring an architect before you have a solid operational foundation. An architect will design complex systems that your current team cannot maintain.

Confusing IT Support with IT Infrastructure. If your engineers spend all their time resetting passwords, they have no time for network improvements.

Assuming senior engineers will manage themselves. Even senior infrastructure staff need clear project goals regarding uptime, security patching, and capacity planning.

Hiring guidance

Decisions to make before the search

Start your intake by identifying the biggest bottleneck in your current environment. Is it connectivity, storage capacity, or user access speed? This defines the primary skill set for your first hire.

When conducting interviews, run a technical assessment based on your current network diagrams. Ask the candidate to identify one single point of failure in your architecture and propose a low-cost fix.

Evaluate candidates based on their ability to explain complex technical concepts in plain language. If an engineer cannot explain why a redundant firewall is necessary to a non-technical manager, they will struggle to get budget approval for future projects.

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Questions buyers ask

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Tell us about the role

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Related positions and guidance

• IT Infrastructure and Networking
• Positions in this family
• Network Engineer
• Systems Administrator
• Systems Engineer
• Data Center Engineer
• Senior Network Engineer
• Network Architect
• Wireless Network Engineer
• VoIP / Unified Communications Engineer
• All positions
• Hiring guides
• Credentials and certifications
• Search timing