Lead Architect

Within the Network Business Division( NBD) of ALE (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise), under the management of the Wireless and Platform business unit leader, the Lead Software Architect will have the responsibility to lead the Architect team focused on WLAN and LAN Network platform management. The candidate should be :

• An accomplished Architect with extensive experience in all phases of Network management presales, architecture design, development and deployment.
• Known for effectively managing global teams, project management and leadership for the design and implementation of fully integrated networks.
• Recognized for troubleshooting and strong understanding of access points and appliances, evaluating and improving existing systems with new features and performance improvements with a consistent record of on time, on budget project delivery, resulting in cutting costs, increased product value and revenue streams significantly impacting bottom line results.

She/he is an expert at network management principles (WLAN and LAN Network Management) and best practices, solution design, design architecture, emerging technologies, cross platform troubleshooting techniques. The role represents and champions the core values of the organization and encourages collaboration across all teams -CTO / RD / Validation. The role creates proposals and recommends solutions for approval and reviews technical designs to ensure alignment with the best network management architecture practices/principals and company technology vision. She/he is responsible for promoting, enforcing, and documenting solution decisions across impacted programs. Lead Architect is a senior technology leader in the organization and contributes at the highest levels for technology decisions, selections, and strategy.

A successful Lead Architect will m aintain proficiency in the technology stack that directly applies to the suite of products created by ALE. It is required that the Lead software architect remain up to date on the latest technologies in Network Management domain, latest architectures and architectural styles, best-of-breed components/tools for developing/validating a scalable architecture, to implement a successful and functional product. The Lead Architect will share technical concepts with other Architects and Lead engineers with ease, allowing the team to develop intuitive software that meets and exceeds the needs of ALE.

The Lead Architect will work closely with the Product Line Managers to prioritize features and enhancements for upcoming releases. The candidate will engage leadership to move our products forward through defined goals and milestones. As the Lead Architect grows with the company, their depth and breadth of understanding of our various software must grow with them. Maintaining this understanding is necessary to ensure that new enhancements consider the full product s functionality. With this knowledge, they will be able to work with Development Leads and Managers to resolve technically blocking situations during development and validation phases. This knowledge will also help them identify problems within ALE software systems and propose solutions.

The Lead Architect will actively seek ways to achieve cross-leveraging of ALE products, to build an ecosystem that solves business problems for our customers. The individual should demonstrate resourcefulness and troubleshooting aptitude, as well have a strong attention to detail. The individual should drive product excellence by helping teams define and build products that generate measurable value.

They should work with other cross functional engineering teams and partner teams to define the technical specifications and API from each party to achieve the overall solution, hold architecture discussions with them and arrive at mutually beneficial decisions. They should coordinate with product and project management to provide an understanding of the technical feasibility of new roadmap items, assist in new release planning and effort estimations.

The Lead Architect will proactively identify risks and communicate them clearly to the relevant stakeholders, and help plan for success through mitigation options. The individual will be the technical voice for communications with customers and Sales teams.

Their roles and responsibilities are to:

• Manage a team of Architects.
• Produce technical architecture, designs for functional networks (WLAN, SD-LAN/WAN, CLOUD) and their management.
• Lead Network management architecture discussions and decisions.
• Work closely with application, server, security, infrastructure and operations teams, effectively communicating and managing customer expectations
• Provide enterprise architecture technical leadership for global initiatives and implementation collaboration with project and operations teams.
• Identify opportunities to innovate, extend and enhance service delivery
• Hands on RD / POC work for evaluating new technologies
• Serve as escalation point for support and troubleshooting, provides guidance and direction in resolution of escalated application or system problems.
• Create and maintain system documentation for solution design, Domain technologies
• Improve existing processes through solutions to recurring problems and enhancements to existing solutions or documentation.
• Provide strong technical leadership and communications skills including teamwork, facilitation, and coordination to ensure successful creation of roadmaps.

Education, Experience, Knowledge Skills:

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or related fields.
• Minimum 10+ years of relevant experience in a professional development environment
• Minimum 5+ years of experience as an Architect, building large-scale Enterprise-grade software based on recent technologies.
• Minimum 2 years of supervisory experience.
• Minimum 2 years of experience on AI/ML
• Evidence of effective communication and relationship skills, especially the ability to articulate advanced technical topics to both technical and non-technical staff
• Working knowledge in multi-vendor infrastructure platforms (i.e., Aruba / HP, Cisco, Meraki, Silver Peak, Zscaler)
• Experience with networking technologies: Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), high availability (HA), WLAN and resiliency architectures
• Knowledge of Network monitoring tools (i.e., NetScout, Wireshark, Solarwinds, Cisco Call Manager, Wireshark, and Splunk)
• Knowledge of Network Boundary (Next Generation Firewalls (Palo Alto, Fortinet), IPSEC/SSL VPN Concentrators)
• Knowledge of Java, Javascript, NodeJS, AWS/OVH/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, Quarkus, PostgresDB, Time-series databases.
• Expertise in Network Management (NMS/EMS) Domain is a must.
• Familiary with Event Driven Architecture, CQRS, Design Patterns preferred.
• Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and Cloud DevOps preferred.
• Evidence of technical certifications preferred (e.g., CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, ACE-A, SEC+)
• Deep understanding of software engineering and established best practices.
• Ability to apply out of the box thinking about creative ways to use Cloud services.
• Ability to work with a limited set of requirements.
• Evidence of desire to mentor colleagues, drive new architectures, and lead team efforts.
• Experience in cybersecurity engineering, network intelligence and operations, and machine learning are highly desired.
• Ability to model empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence.
• Experience hiring in a values-led organization, emphasizing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging