Consultant - Sales Engineer

Overview

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

Must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, US.

The Ciena Global Cloud Networking (GCN) Account team is looking for a self-motivated, sociable, highly technical sales engineer to help support strategic GCN accounts as they continue to grow and deploy Ciena technology.

With a growing product portfolio, the current sales engineering team needs additional resources to support ongoing lab engagements, expanding install base, and a wide variety of customer touch points. The candidate must have knowledge of all areas of telecommunications network architecture and engineering, including core backbone networks, datacenter and regional fabrics, datacenter and regional aggregation, as well as edge / peering. Excellent communication skills and a willingness to learn are critical for this role to support customer contacts with skill levels ranging from PhD to technician.

This is a unique opportunity to be part of state-of-the-art critical infrastructure buildouts at scale. Join a dedicated, diverse, and dynamic Sales Engineering team, where you will leverage your technical background and consulting expertise to help customers understand and adopt Ciena technology through back-and-forth forums and lab engagement.

How You Will Contribute

• Technical expert providing ongoing lab support to customers
• Ciena's optical transport portfolio SME providing ongoing engineering consulting support to customers (Waveserver, 6500-S, 6500-RLS and Coherent Pluggable modules)
• Expert customer-facing point of contact for advanced technical collaboration conversations, focused on software and APIs to enable new products or software
• Support bid responses, technical presentations, demos, and proofs of concept throughout a sales cycle
• Gather technical requirements, evaluate new product feature requests, define feature requests, and drive internal prioritization while monitoring the feature request lifecycle through implementation and field deployment
• Provide continuous support with Product Defects Management, HW and SW Release Management, and Quality Management
• Engage regularly with Ciena's PLM & R&D to communicate software solutions required to sustain the business of GCN customers, focusing on next-generation products and architectures and incremental platform enhancements
• Manage Engineering Action Item Register / Dashboard; present AIR to internal and external audiences
• Provide emergency support for critical install base issues, product design issues, and customer root cause analysis
• Act as customer advocate and internal liaison providing post-sales support to Professional Services, Operations, and Logistics teams
• Support network design validation using Ciena planning tools (PlannerPlus)
• Support customer Q&A forums (Workplace)
• Technical training support – course delivery and auditing
• Provide support with hardware and services PO / quote generation
• Support the sales team with tracking customer-specific activities through Salesforce while developing relationships with key customer stakeholders
• Present account status updates weekly to the broader sales team
• Travel as required for training, off-site meetings, and inter-company events

The Must Haves

The annual total target compensation pay range for this position in California is $195,600 - $312,300 USD. This includes both base and incentive compensation.

Not ready to apply? Join our Talent Community to get relevant job alerts straight to your inbox.

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.

J-18808-Ljbffr