EXPOSED
A large share of the day is documentation, diagramming, config generation, IP addressing schemes, and vendor spec comparison — all of which LLMs already produce at usable quality, and network-as-code tooling is compressing the rest. What persists is owning the topology decision when a hospital or bank cannot tolerate downtime, walking a data center or campus to see what the drawings got wrong, and being the person accountable when a segmentation choice becomes a breach. No licensure protects this role; certifications like CCIE/CCDE are market signals, not legal gates.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $112,690 → $134,050 -4.8% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+11.9% 179,200 → 200,600 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +11.9% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~11,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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DevOps EngineerPlatform EngineerSite Reliability Engineer
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Subnet plans, VLAN maps, BGP/OSPF config templates, capacity spreadsheets and RFP spec matrices are text artifacts a model drafts in seconds, and Terraform/Ansible/NetBox pipelines already generate device configs from intent — what keeps this at 9 rather than 4 is the multi-year refresh design where you reconcile a 15-year-old wiring closet, an MPLS contract, and a QoS requirement no one wrote down.
Some physical or field component You are on the raised floor for cutovers, tracing an undocumented fiber run, checking rack power and cooling headroom before signing off on a spine-and-leaf build, and doing campus walk-throughs for wireless heat maps — but that is weeks a year, not daily, and the design work itself happens in Visio and a terminal, which puts it at 7 and not in the field-tech range.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no PE stamp, no state board, and no statute that requires a licensed human to approve a network design; CCIE, CCDE and CISSP get you shortlisted and get your employer partner status, but nothing prevents an unlicensed person — or a vendor's automated design tool — from producing the same topology and having it deployed.
Meaningful discretion Choosing flat-versus-segmented for a hospital network, deciding whether to accept a single point of failure to hit a budget, and signing off on a firewall policy that will be read in a breach post-mortem are calls with no clean answer and consequences measured in outage minutes and HIPAA/PCI findings — 13 rather than higher because you usually recommend into a change-approval board or CIO who formally owns the acceptance.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (9/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (13/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 22 of this occupation's 38 points (58%).
Embodiment (7/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to computer network architects on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 59/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: this role genuinely has two tiers. As diagramming, IPAM planning, config generation and vendor spec comparison get absorbed by network-as-code and LLM tooling, the residual job is failure-domain reasoning, migration cutover sequencing under a no-downtime constraint, and adjudicating vendor claims against observed behavior — work that is scarce, ambiguous, and consequence-heavy. The score rises because the denominator shrinks, not because AI got worse.
Cyber insurers conditioning coverage on an attested human-reviewed network segmentation and backup-isolation design — already visible in ransomware underwriting questionnaires from Coalition, Beazley, Chubb — hardened into a named-architect sign-off clause rather than a checkbox.
Critical-infrastructure cyber rules that name an accountable individual: CISA's CIRCIA reporting regime, NERC CIP-005/CIP-007 evidence requiring a named responsible engineer to attest to electronic security perimeter design, and SEC cyber disclosure practice pushing firms to designate a signing network/security architect. If a sector regulator (FERC/NERC, HHS HIPAA Security Rule update, or EU NIS2 as implemented in national law with personal management liability) requires a named human to sign off segmentation and perimeter architecture, this rises materially.
Post-incident regulatory practice (e.g. state AG or OCR settlements naming architecture decisions as root cause, or Change Healthcare-style congressional inquiry) making the topology/segmentation owner an identified party in breach findings, which formalizes what is currently informal ownership.
Growth of edge/industrial and OT network work — plant floors, hospital wings, substations — where as-built drawings are wrong and commissioning requires physically tracing fiber, verifying cabinet grounding, and validating airgap claims. Rises only if the occupation's center of gravity shifts from cloud/campus toward OT convergence.
Limited route. Buyers pay for the vendor's or integrator's name and accountability, not for a human per se. The closest real mechanism is customer contracts demanding a named CCDE/CCIE-holding individual as design authority on the engagement — visible in some federal and defense integrator SOWs — which is a credential premium more than a human premium.
The limit. Realistic ceiling is mid-50s. Even with sector cyber rules, accountability attaches to the firm and to CISO-level officers, not to a licensed individual network architect — there is no board, no exam-to-practice gate, and no plausible movement toward one. The task_resistance gain is real but self-limiting: it comes from the job shrinking, so headcount pressure continues even as the residual role gets harder to automate.
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 10,260 | $139,230 +4% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 10,230 | $163,010 +22% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 9,370 | $159,820 +19% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 5,900 | $137,900 +3% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 5,880 | $133,890 +0% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 5,400 | $143,800 +7% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 5,240 | $160,650 +20% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 3,710 | $172,650 +29% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,730 | $186,110 +39% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 3,710 | $172,650 +29% |
| Rochester, MN | 90 | $168,910 +26% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 38. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.