Top 12 Network Design Engineer Skills to Put on Your Resume

In today’s fast-moving network world, standing out as a network design engineer hinges on a sharp mix of technical depth and people sense. Your resume should make that shine without fluff—skills that prove you can shape, secure, and steer complex networks with calm precision.

Network Design Engineer Skills

1. Cisco IOS
2. Juniper Junos
3. BGP
4. OSPF
5. MPLS
6. IPv6
7. QoS
8. Wireshark
9. Python
10. VMware NSX
11. AWS Networking
12. SD-WAN

1. Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System) powers most Cisco routers and many switches. It’s the engine for routing, switching, policy, and security—where design decisions become real, line by line.

Why It's Important

For a Network Design Engineer, IOS is the canvas and the toolkit. It enables you to implement architectures, enforce policy, harden surfaces, and monitor at scale—reliably, predictably.

How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills

Sharper IOS outcomes come from clean design, smart automation, and vigilant care.

1. Configuration discipline: Standardize templates, prune legacy commands, and enforce least privilege. Use structured configs and golden baselines.
2. Stay current: Keep to tested long-lived releases and plan upgrades to close vulnerabilities and unlock features.
3. Use advanced features: Apply QoS for real-time traffic, VRFs for segmentation, and EEM for event-driven actions.
4. Security first: SSH, AAA with role-based access, signed images, secure boot, control-plane policing, and tight ACLs.
5. Observability: NetFlow/IPFIX, model-driven telemetry, and EEM scripts to catch drift early.
6. Manage at scale: Adopt Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly DNA Center) or API-driven workflows for consistency and speed.
7. Keep learning: Hands-on labs and release notes beat guesswork. Review validated designs.

Solid building blocks, fewer surprises, smoother operations.

How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume

2. Juniper Junos

Junos OS runs across Juniper’s routing, switching, and security platforms. One syntax, consistent behavior, automation-friendly—built for clean operations.

Why It's Important

Unified software simplifies design and day-two work. Reliability, strong routing, and security features make Junos a steady anchor in multi-vendor networks.

How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills

1. Keep software aligned: Track recommended releases, standardize versions, and stage upgrades carefully.
2. Automate: Use commit scripts, event policies, and tools like PyEZ or Ansible to enforce intent and compliance.
3. Design for scale: Clean IGP areas, proper BGP policy, and route summarization. Respect control-plane limits.
4. Harden devices: SSH-only access, system services locked down, firewall filters on loopback and control-plane, strong AAA.
5. Telemetry and logs: Stream telemetry, health bots, and precise commit history to troubleshoot faster.
6. Train and certify: Deep dives into routing policy, EVPN/VXLAN, and security pay off quickly.

How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume

3. BGP

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the Internet’s routing policy brain. Between autonomous systems, across data centers, through clouds—BGP steers traffic with intent and control.

Why It's Important

It delivers scale, multi-homing, and policy-driven path control. With BGP you craft redundancy, segment traffic, and influence routes without chaos.

How to Improve BGP Skills

1. Strict filtering: Prefix-lists, AS-path filters, max-prefix limits, and communities. Only accept and advertise what you must.
2. Aggregate sensibly: Summarize to shrink tables and stabilize convergence.
3. Reflect wisely: Use route reflectors to reduce peering mesh; design clusters for resiliency.
4. Security: RPKI origin validation, TCP-AO/MD5, GTSM, and session damping. Keep a tight control plane.
5. Multiprotocol BGP: Carry VPNv4/v6, EVPN, and IPv6 unicast cleanly. RFC 4760 is the cornerstone.
6. Stability tuning: BFD for fast failure detection, route damping with care, graceful restart where appropriate.
7. Observe continuously: BMP collectors, route analytics, and path-change alerting to catch leaks and flaps.

Policy before plumbing. Guardrails before growth.

How to Display BGP Skills on Your Resume

4. OSPF

OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a link-state IGP that builds a full topology view and converges quickly. It scales with areas, supports IPv4 and IPv6, and behaves predictably when designed with care.

Why It's Important

Inside large networks, OSPF provides fast reconvergence, deterministic design, and tidy scaling—perfect for structured core/distribution/access topologies.

How to Improve OSPF Skills

1. Use multi-area hierarchy: Contain LSAs, shrink databases, and keep ABR boundaries meaningful.
2. Tune timers the right way: Hello/Dead intervals balanced with BFD for faster detection without meltdown.
3. Stub/NSSA where needed: Keep external routes out of quiet areas to reduce churn.
4. Summarize at ABRs/ASBRs: Fewer prefixes, calmer networks, quicker convergence.
5. Correct path influence: Adjust interface cost for route selection; use interface priority only for DR/BDR elections.
6. Authenticate: OSPFv2 MD5 or OSPFv3 with IPsec to prevent rogue adjacencies.

Contain the blast radius, and OSPF stays serene.

How to Display OSPF Skills on Your Resume

5. MPLS

MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) accelerates forwarding and carves traffic into engineered paths. It enables L3VPNs/L2VPNs, traffic engineering, and consistent QoS end to end.

Why It's Important

For complex backbones and provider-style designs, MPLS delivers scale, determinism, and clean separation of services.

How to Improve MPLS Skills

1. Traffic engineering: RSVP-TE or Segment Routing to control paths, balance load, and guarantee bandwidth.
2. QoS alignment: Map classes consistently across domains so voice/video and critical apps stay protected.
3. Fast reroute: MPLS FRR or TI-LFA to slash failover time.
4. Segment Routing: Simplify label distribution and centralize intent with SR-MPLS or SRv6.
5. Security stance: MPLS doesn’t encrypt—pair it with IPsec/MACsec when confidentiality is required; isolate tenants strictly.
6. Operational hygiene: Regular audits of label allocation, LDP/RSVP health, and LFIB correctness.
7. Track standards and interop: Align with current IETF guidance and vendor best practices.

Less mystery in the label stack, more control in your design.

How to Display MPLS Skills on Your Resume

6. IPv6

IPv6 expands address space massively, streamlines autoconfiguration, and modernizes routing. It’s the long-term backbone for an everything-connected world.

Why It's Important

Scalability, end-to-end reachability, and simpler addressing plans. Security features like IPsec are natively supported in stacks (though deployment is a design choice), and operations tooling now broadly understands IPv6.

How to Improve IPv6 Skills

1. Dual-stack first: Run IPv4 and IPv6 together while you migrate; plan parity for routing, ACLs, and monitoring.
2. Addressing discipline: Allocate with nibble boundaries, document clearly, and aggregate aggressively.
3. Transition tools: Use NAT64/DNS64, SIIT, or proxies when IPv4-only apps linger.
4. Routing: OSPFv3 and MP-BGP for scalable control; keep policies symmetric and summarized.
5. Security: Explicit IPv6 ACLs, RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard, and IPsec where needed.
6. QoS and visibility: Match on IPv6 headers/DSCP, enable full-stack telemetry, and ensure tools parse extension headers.
7. Test relentlessly: Lab strange corners—multicast, PMTUD, and neighbor discovery at scale.

How to Display IPv6 Skills on Your Resume

7. QoS

QoS (Quality of Service) shapes how packets contend for resources. It identifies, classifies, prioritizes, and polices so important traffic cuts the line when the network gets busy.

Why It's Important

When links saturate, QoS keeps real-time voice/video crisp and critical apps responsive. It’s the difference between jitter and joy.

How to Improve QoS Skills

1. Classify with intent: DSCP/CoS markings defined at the edge, validated in the core. No vague buckets.
2. Prioritize properly: Use LLQ for voice, dedicate bandwidth for video, and protect control and storage flows.
3. Shape and police: Shape at edges, police noisy talkers, and honor contractual rates across WANs.
4. Queue management: Weighted fair queuing and WRED to ease congestion gracefully.
5. Consistent policy: Align markings and class maps across LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, and cloud.
6. Monitor outcomes: Track jitter, latency, loss, and MOS; adjust policies based on real data.

How to Display QoS Skills on Your Resume

8. Wireshark

Wireshark is the go-to packet microscope. Capture, filter, decode—see what the wire actually whispers.

Why It's Important

Designs fail in the details. With Wireshark you validate assumptions, pinpoint latency, and unravel oddities that logs gloss over.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Profiles and color rules: Tailor views per protocol or project; highlight outliers instantly.
2. Filters fluency: Master capture and display filters to zero in on signal, not noise.
3. Decode depth: Follow TCP streams, inspect TLS handshakes, analyze retransmits and out-of-order segments.
4. Automation: Use tshark and Lua dissectors for repeatable workflows and custom parsing.
5. Time and timing: Normalize timestamps, compare sides of a flow, and measure micro-bursts.
6. Stay current: New dissectors and fixes land often; update and retest profiles.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

9. Python

Python glues networks together—automation, testing, reporting, and orchestration with libraries built for engineers.

Why It's Important

Repeatable tasks become scripts. Scripts become pipelines. Pipelines become policy—fast, accurate, and versioned.

How to Improve Python Skills

1. Get the core right: Solid grasp of functions, modules, virtual environments, packaging, and testing.
2. Network libraries: Netmiko, NAPALM, Nornir, pyATS/Genie—pick the right tool for device control and validation.
3. APIs and models: Work with REST, gNMI, NETCONF, YANG. Parse JSON/YAML like second nature.
4. Data handling: Use Jinja2 for templating, Pandas for analysis, and Rich/logging for clean output.
5. CI/CD for networks: Pre-change checks, linting, and automated rollbacks in your pipeline.
6. Real projects: Back up configs, drift-detect, build inventory sources, and generate intent-based configs.

How to Display Python Skills on Your Resume

10. VMware NSX

VMware NSX brings network and security into software—logical switching, routing, and distributed firewalls close to workloads, across data centers and clouds.

Why It's Important

Micro-segmentation, rapid provisioning, and consistent security policy—NSX lets you design networks that move at application speed without losing control.

How to Improve VMware NSX Skills

1. Design with tiers: Use Tier-0/Tier-1 gateways and distributed routing to keep east-west traffic local and efficient.
2. Micro-segmentation: Define granular policies with groups and context; shrink lateral movement dramatically.
3. Performance tuning: Optimize overlay MTU, offloads, and Edge node placement; right-size Edge clusters.
4. Automate: Drive NSX with its APIs and integrate with your IaC pipelines for repeatable, governed changes.
5. Integrate security: Leverage distributed IDS/IPS and align policy with app identity, not just IPs.
6. Operate cleanly: Backup/restore, intent validation, and continuous compliance checks.

How to Display VMware NSX Skills on Your Resume

11. AWS Networking

AWS networking spans VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, Route 53, load balancers, and more—global infrastructure you stitch into a resilient, performant fabric.

Why It's Important

Cloud designs live or die on networking. Secure connectivity, scalable patterns, and smart routing keep apps snappy and safe.

How to Improve AWS Networking Skills

1. Architect for resilience: Multi-AZ as a default, region failover plans, and sane route propagation.
2. Cost and performance: Right-size NAT and load balancers, place workloads near users, and use Global Accelerator when latency bites.
3. Connectivity choices: Pick the right underlay—DX for predictability, VPN for speed-to-value, or both for hybrid high-availability.
4. Simplify at scale: Use Transit Gateway or Cloud WAN to tame many VPCs and sites with consistent policy.
5. Segment and secure: Security Groups and NACLs layered carefully; PrivateLink and VPC Lattice for private service access.
6. Observability: VPC Flow Logs, CloudWatch metrics, reachability analyzers, and Route 53 health checks to validate intent.
7. Automate: Model networks with CloudFormation/Terraform and test changes before they land.

How to Display AWS Networking Skills on Your Resume

12. SD-WAN

SD-WAN applies software-defined control to the WAN, selecting paths by application and performance, across MPLS, broadband, LTE/5G, and more.

Why It's Important

It slashes cost, boosts agility, and keeps user experience steady across branches, remote users, and clouds—without giving up security.

How to Improve SD-WAN Skills

1. Application-aware policies: Identify apps accurately and steer them over the best path based on loss/latency/jitter.
2. Integrated security: NGFW, IPS, and secure web gateways baked into the fabric; SASE alignment for remote edges.
3. Scalable design: Hub-and-spoke, full mesh, or hybrid—pick per use case and simplify with segments/VRFs.
4. Transport mix: Blend MPLS, DIA, and 5G for cost and performance; measure continuously and adapt.
5. Operational visibility: Central orchestration, rich telemetry, and AIOps hints to catch brownouts before users do.
6. QoS end to end: Honor markings across underlays; shape and prioritize at the edge.
7. Training and validation: Lab failovers, brownout scenarios, and policy drift checks; keep playbooks current.

How to Display SD-WAN Skills on Your Resume