Optical Network Engineer III
Location: Open to three locations:
Ashburn, VA 20147
Phoenix, AZ 85012
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Duration: 12 months with possibility of long-term extension
Schedule: Monday-Friday, 8:00 AM-5:00 PM
Hours: 40 hours per week; participation in an on-call rotation may require weekend availability, with additional pay provided
Work Arrangement: Hybrid for Sunnyvale; employees based in Ashburn or Phoenix will report to a local data center facility as needed
Compensation: $66.00/hr. - $80.00/hr.
Employment Type: W2 (not open to C2C, 1099, or visa sponsorship)
Role Overview
Our client is seeking an Optical Network Engineer III with strong optical networking experience to support the operation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and expansion of large-scale network infrastructure. This role will work with multi-vendor optical transport equipment across metro sites, data centers, and cloud interconnects while supporting network incidents and collaborating with engineering teams on network design and capacity planning.
Responsibilities
• Monitor, troubleshoot, provision, and maintain multi-vendor OTN/DWDM equipment across network sites, data centers, and cloud interconnects.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and serve as an escalation point for network and service-related incidents.
• Coordinate with remote hands, carriers, hardware vendors, and globally distributed teams to resolve network issues.
• Support optical network design, capacity planning, and the evaluation and integration of new optical technologies.
• Configure and provision network devices from major optical transport vendors.
• Support network scaling, integration, and operational improvements.
• Participate in change management, outage mitigation, and post-mortem processes.
• Collaborate with engineering teams and stakeholders to evaluate technical approaches and drive solutions.
Qualifications
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with major OTN equipment from vendors such as Infinera/Nokia, Ciena, or ADVA/Adtran.
• Strong knowledge of optical transport, system design, device delivery, and network operations.
• Experience troubleshooting network issues and managing service-related incidents.
• Experience participating in an on-call schedule as an escalation point.
• Experience working in a lights-out environment or coordinating with remote hands.
• Ability to work effectively with vendors and globally distributed teams.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience provisioning network device configurations for major OTN vendors and hardware.
• Strong knowledge of TCP, IPv4/IPv6, and dynamic routing protocols such as BGP and IS-IS.
• Experience supporting large-scale greenfield or brownfield network architectures, designs, and deployments.
• Experience working with enterprise or service-provider backbone and data center network fabrics.
• Experience with change management, outage mitigation, and blameless post-mortem processes.
• Strong interpersonal and technical skills with the ability to build consensus among stakeholders.
• Experience with programming or scripting languages such as Go or Python.
• Familiarity with Linux-based environments, including bash/zsh.