Cisco ISE Engineer

This six-month contract role is based in Denver, Colorado. The engineer will assess, clean up, and upgrade an existing Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) environment that supports Wi-Fi authentication. The primary focus is ISE configuration, policy, platform health, and upgrade execution. Wireless engineering experience is helpful but not required.

Responsibilities:

• Assess the current Cisco ISE deployment, configuration, policies, and operational health.
• Identify configuration inconsistencies, outdated settings, and opportunities to simplify or improve the environment.
• Plan and support a Cisco ISE upgrade, including prerequisites, sequencing, change coordination, validation, and rollback planning.
• Review and maintain authentication and authorization policies, policy sets, identity sources, and related services.
• Troubleshoot authentication and access issues by using logs and policy results to identify root causes.
• Coordinate with network, security, and infrastructure teams to understand dependencies and minimize service disruption.
• Document the existing environment, changes made, test results, and operational recommendations.
• Support testing of wireless authentication flows and help resolve issues involving ISE and network access infrastructure.

Qualifications:

• Required: Hands-on experience administering and troubleshooting Cisco ISE in an enterprise environment.
• Required: Experience with Cisco ISE upgrades, configuration cleanup, or platform maintenance.
• Required: Working knowledge of network access authentication and authorization, including Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and IEEE 802.1X.
• Required: Ability to analyze authentication failures and communicate findings clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Required: Experience planning and documenting changes in a production environment.
• Preferred: Wireless networking experience, such as Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) configuration, access point operations, or radio frequency (RF) fundamentals.
• Preferred: Experience troubleshooting end-to-end Wi-Fi authentication involving ISE, wireless controllers, and access points.
• Preferred: Familiarity with identity integrations such as Microsoft Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), certificates, and endpoint profiling.
• Preferred: Relevant Cisco certifications or equivalent practical experience.

Tools and Technologies:

• Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
• RADIUS and IEEE 802.1X
• Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers and access points
• Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, and certificate services
• Cisco ISE logging, policy results, endpoint profiling, and change documentation tools