Advanced Technical Support Engineer 3 in Manchester

As the global leader in high-speed connectivity, Ciena is committed to a people-first approach. Our teams enjoy a culture focused on prioritising a flexible work environment that empowers individual growth, well-being, and belonging. We’re a technology company that leads with our humanity—driving our business priorities alongside meaningful social, community, and societal impact.

Ciena has a vacancy in the EMEA region for an Advanced Technical Support Engineer with a strong networking and software background. In this role, you will work very closely with our Global Telecommunication and Enterprise Customers, Global Engineering Community, R&D Engineering and PLM teams. As part of this team, you will be involved in supporting applications being integrated into Ciena’s Blue Planet Orchestration products.

This is a post-sales technical role with a focus on assisting customers in using the Blue Planet Orchestrator and Inventory products. This role is focused on providing post-sales support, requiring a person to have a good breadth of knowledge as well as a sense of urgency to help resolve customer issues at the earliest, interest in learning various applications and showing self-motivation in understanding and making attempts to resolve customer problems, and a good understanding of Linux operating systems, including Red Hat, CentOS and Oracle. The candidate should be able to troubleshoot and review logs based on the symptoms of the problem.

Your Responsibilities:

• Prime Ciena contact for any Blue Planet customer case/issue opened.
• Interact with customers daily, identifying, analysing and resolving issues, working on production and non-prod deployment– providing feedback into the larger Ciena team for resolution.
• Raise issues with the Engineering teams as required to get issues resolved and delivered to the customer.
• Come up with workarounds to minimise customer dissatisfaction with functionality shortcomings.
• Provide feedback back into the account/PLM/R&D community to help improve product functionality in future releases.
• Ensure overall customer deployment plans and timelines are driven to success, and any limiting issues are successfully addressed through the Ciena team.
• Act as the customer advocate internally to Ciena, and the Ciena support person to the customer.
• Availability to travel if required.

Required Skills:

• Detail-oriented with strong analytical and problem resolution skills in a customer-facing role.
• Expert monitoring, debugging and troubleshooting skills to collect all the needed information with minimal access and provide information to engineering/PLM for resolution.
• Good automation skills to come up with tools that will help in collecting the required information from the Customer site with minimal downtime.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Good communication is a must for this role at a high-end technical level (general product overview), down to deep dive root cause type analysis.
• Should be able to work independently and be able to work with a globally distributed team (Occasional weekend support and extra hours needed).
• Good understanding of telecom evolution, like 3G, 4G and 5G, along with exposure to RAN architecture.
• Customer-facing experience with data networking and/or IT applications solutions at OSI layers 2-7 and CLI/configuration knowledge for one or more Telco vendors.

Desired Experience:

• Strong Linux skills with some scripting a plus.
• Strong Network Troubleshooting experience.
• Knowledge of the OSS/BSS/Network Management solutions/Systems.
• Languages: JAVA, Python, Shell Scripting.
• Database(s): PostgreSQL, Neo4j, MySQL.
• Knowledge of SNMP, Syslog, ICMP, and SSH is recommended.
• Hands-on experience on RESTful APIs – interconnected software components interaction, engineering and testing (e.g. NMS applications, controllers, orchestrators, supervisory systems, etc.).
• Experience and understanding of the Kafka messaging bus.
• Understanding of Business Process Management Notation (BPMN).
• Understanding of Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).
• Experience with the following open-source technologies: Logstash, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Nagios, Grafana, Swagger API, Open-API and knowledge of TM Forums, haproxy.
• Deployment environment: Kubernetes, Docker, microservices.
• Deployment experience in cloud-based environments, such as AWS/Azure/GCP/OpenShift/WRCP.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline – Jenkins, etc., is an advantage.
• Source Control (SVN, GitHub) and Ticketing systems (JIRA, Salesforce, others).

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field from a college or university with 5+ years related experience (or master’s with 3+ years).
• Preferably 5+ years’ experience supporting software solutions.
• Preferably has experience in an Engineering or technical support role with an equipment vendor in the Telco industry.

At Ciena, we are committed to building and fostering an environment in which our employees feel respected, valued, and heard. Ciena values the diversity of its workforce and respects its employees as individuals. We do not tolerate any form of discrimination. Ciena is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status. If contacted in relation to a job opportunity, please advise Ciena of any accommodation measures you may require.