Job Description
Ciena is committed to our people-first philosophy. Our teams enjoy a culture focused on prioritizing a personalized and flexible work environment that empowers an individual’s passions, growth, wellbeing and belonging. We’re a technology company that leads with our humanity—driving our business priorities alongside meaningful social, community, and societal impact.
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The Solution Architect position is a technical resource supporting Blue Planet sales team and is responsible for actively supporting the product evaluation in the sales process. They will work with the Sales Leader and Strategic Partner Sales point of contact, Technical Sales Leader and Enterprise Architect as a product expert and technical advisor. They must be able to articulate technology and product positioning to both business and technical users, identify technical issues at assigned accounts. Ensure customer satisfaction through all stages of the sales process. They will support a number of Strategic Global System Integrators (GSI) that are a major channel for Blue Planet and engage directly with customers as needed.
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Present the product functionality in detail to customer prospects and partner teams and be able to explain how the product is able to address both technical and business problems.
- Conduct product demonstrations at meetings, conferences, seminars, etc.
- Provide input to functional and technical elements of RFIs/RFPs and support the Global System Integrator in the creation of responses.
- Support the product evaluation process and creation of any Proof of Concept (PoC) success criteria with the Partner/Technical/Sales Leader and System Engineering teams.
- Provide input to Services Estimation and associated Statement of Work (SOW), understanding how the product can be configured through supporting services.
- Be a technical resource for product questions and assist in the documentation of product capability for partners and others through knowledge platforms (such as RFP360/Responsive).
- Provide product improvement and roadmap feedback to Product Management using the internal process and associated tools (including Homerun/Aha!).
Job Requirements
- Over 8 years of exp in which minimum 5 years in a pre-sales or project delivery role within the OSS platform industry.
- Experience of telecommunication networking technologies including; WAN’s, LANs, and network infrastructure technologies (including L0/L1/L2/L3 Switching & Routing and Virtual Network Functions), 5G (Wireless)
- A Bachelor/Master’s degree (or equivalent working experience) in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field.
- Direct experience in the sale and/or delivery of at least one of the following OSS platforms:
- Network Orchestration – Activation – Physical and Virtual.
- Network and Service Assurance, Performance and SQM.
- Inventory systems supporting planning or service provisioning.
- Experience working with System Integrators in the Telecom Industry, with understanding on how they engage with our end customers.
- Software product deployment experience including delivery project methodology knowledge.
- Excellent interpersonal verbal and written communications skills
- The ability to provide compelling live product demonstrations
- Experience scoping and managing customer product evaluations
- Proven organizational and problem-solving skills, including the ability to meet a business requirement with a technical solution, even in stressful customer situations.
- Ability to travel domestically and internationally and sometimes on short notice
The following are desirable, but not mandatory:
- Understanding of the Telco OSS ecosystem and ideally deep knowledge of one or more of the existing OSS providers products – Amdocs, Ericsson, Netcracker, Oracle, Nokia etc.
- Understanding of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks such as TOGAF, TMF, LSO, MEF etc.
- Experience in the creation of Solution Requirement documents as part of an OSS deployment project.
- Worked at a major Global SI (Infosys, TechM, TCS, E&Y, Accenture or others) or worked at a Communication Service Provider.
- Fluency in one or more languages besides English
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