Customer Success Program Manager at Nokia

Job description

The Customer Success Program Manager is accountable for the end-to-end success of assigned customer programs, operational services, and support engagements across a defined product and service scope. The role leads cross-functional and geographically dispersed teams from initiation through completion; establishes program goals aligned with customer objectives and Nokia strategy; manages scope, cost, schedule, quality, risk, opportunities, and contractual commitments; and ensures exceptional customer satisfaction, financial performance, health and safety, and operational delivery. The successful candidate acts as the customer’s trusted advisor and coordinates R&D, Product Line Management, Technical Support, Quality, Supply Chain, Logistics, Professional Services, Sales, and Account Management to achieve rapid issue resolution, proactive risk mitigation, and continuous improvement.  • Strategic Customer Leadership: Serve as the primary advocate, executive-facing representative, trusted advisor, and single point of accountability for the hyperscale customer; build relationships across operational, engineering, architecture, procurement, and executive organizations; understand customer objectives and drive a proactive white-glove experience. • Technical Leadership and Escalation Management: Lead complex, high-severity escalations across software, hardware, IP networking, optical transport, cloud infrastructure, network management, logistics, and operational processes; coordinate investigation and resolution, challenge assumptions, close technical gaps, and maintain ownership through completion. • Root Cause, Quality, and Engineering Engagement: Connect customer engineering teams with Nokia R&D, Product Line Management, Quality, and Technical Support; drive root cause analysis, corrective actions, lab replication, defect validation, feature prioritization, reliability improvements, and incorporation of field experience into product and service plans. • Program and Project Management: Manage concurrent deployments, upgrades, hardware replacement programs, quality initiatives, reliability programs, and service improvement projects; maintain integrated plans, milestones, action registers, resources, dependencies, risks, communications, and executive status reporting. • Contract, Financial, and Delivery Performance: Control scope, schedule, cost, quality, profitability, forecasts, contractual commitments, acceptance, claims, changes, handovers, and closure; align delivery with Nokia governance and identify appropriate renewal or expansion opportunities. • Cross-Functional and Virtual Team Leadership: Lead geographically dispersed teams without direct authority; align engineering, support, operations, quality, supply chain, logistics, professional services, sales, and account management; assign and track actions, resolve conflicts, remove barriers, and drive accountability and urgency. • Operational Excellence and Governance: Conduct operational reviews, business reviews, governance meetings, and program checkpoints; monitor contractual KPIs, service performance, case trends, escalation metrics, customer satisfaction, and corrective-action effectiveness; ensure program data, risks, opportunities, and decisions remain current. • Risk Management and Continuous Improvement: Identify delivery, technical, operational, commercial, and customer-experience risks; implement mitigation plans, address recurring issues, apply lessons learned and best practices, and develop customer success plans that improve reliability, efficiency, quality, and measurable business outcomes. • Executive and Customer Communications: Deliver concise, actionable incident updates, executive briefings, status reports, operational and business reviews, and customer-facing presentations; translate complex technical issues, progress, decisions, risks, and mitigation strategies for technical and non-technical audiences while maintaining credibility and transparency. You have: • Industry Experience: 10+ years in telecommunications, IP networking, cloud infrastructure, optical networking, or a related technology field. • Customer-Facing Leadership: 5+ years in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Program Management, Escalation Management, Support Leadership, or a comparable role supporting hyperscale cloud providers or large enterprise customers. • Technical Expertise: Strong knowledge of IP networking, optical transport, DWDM, Ethernet and Layer 2/3 technologies, cloud infrastructure, network management systems, and hardware and software troubleshooting. • Technical Investigation: Experience engaging software developers, systems architects, support engineers, and product teams, including interpretation of logs, traces, fault-isolation data, defect records, and root cause analyses. • Program and Commercial Management: Proven ability to manage complex initiatives across scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, resources, stakeholders, contracts, global dependencies, and competing priorities. • Escalation and Executive Management: Demonstrated success leading high-severity customer escalations, contractual delivery, corrective actions, and executive-level communications. • Leadership and Influence: Ability to lead large, global, cross-functional teams without direct authority, build consensus, drive accountability, and influence decisions across matrixed organizations. • Stakeholder and Conflict Management: Strong negotiation, conflict-resolution, relationship-management, and problem-solving skills across customer and internal leadership levels. • Communication and Strategic Judgment: Exceptional written, verbal, facilitation, and presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex technical matters for engineers and executives while balancing immediate issue resolution with long-term strategic and commercial objectives. Nokia is seeking an experienced, highly technical Customer Success Program Manager to serve as the strategic leader, primary advocate, and single point of accountability for one of our most critical hyperscale customers. This customer-facing role combines technical leadership, program execution, executive communication, cross-functional influence, commercial discipline, and customer advocacy in a complex, high-pressure environment.

Requirements

Must-haves

Industry Experience: 10+ years in telecommunications, IP networking, cloud infrastructure, optical networking, or a related technology field.
Technical Expertise: Strong knowledge of IP networking, optical transport, DWDM, Ethernet and Layer 2/3 technologies, cloud infrastructure, network management systems, and hardware and software troubleshooting.
Program and Commercial Management: Proven ability to manage complex initiatives across scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, resources, stakeholders, contracts, global dependencies, and competing priorities.
Escalation and Executive Management: Demonstrated success leading high-severity customer escalations, contractual delivery, corrective actions, and executive-level communications.
Leadership and Influence: Ability to lead large, global, cross-functional teams without direct authority, build consensus, drive accountability, and influence decisions across matrixed organizations.
Stakeholder and Conflict Management: Strong negotiation, conflict-resolution, relationship-management, and problem-solving skills across customer and internal leadership levels.

Nice-to-haves

None flagged.

Application prep

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Platform: oracle-cloud
Effort: medium