Sales Engineering Specialist - Optical Networking

About the role

Ciena, a global leader in high-speed connectivity, is hiring a Sales Engineering Specialist in Melbourne for its ANZ Sales Engineering team. The role shapes deployable fixed-transport solutions for a strategic telecommunications service-provider account, combining optical networking, solution design and customer engagement across Ciena's hardware, software and network-control portfolio. It involves regular engagement with customers and internal teams, with some domestic and international travel and occasional work outside standard local hours.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical development of assigned sales opportunities, covering solution strategy, architecture, compliance, assumptions, risks, dependencies and technical positioning.
• Engage customer engineering, operational and commercial stakeholders to understand requirements, build practical solutions and answer technical queries.
• Provide technical guidance for tenders, contract clarifications and fixed-transport opportunities, balancing customer outcomes, solution integrity and commercial viability.
• Prepare technical responses for RFPs and RFQs, including compliance statements, pricing-schedule inputs, engineering clarifications and customer proposals.
• Develop high-level network architectures and solution designs, and review or validate detailed engineering outputs such as equipment layouts, rack layouts, test plans and Methods of Procedure with delivery and post-sales teams.
• Deliver technical presentations, demonstrations, solution evaluations, trials and technology workshops.
• Collaborate with Sales, regional product teams, optical link-engineering teams, R&D, delivery and support teams to progress opportunities and capture reusable solution content.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Telecommunications, Applied Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of relevant telecommunications experience.
• Experience designing or applying fixed-transport network solutions in customer or project environments.
• Nice to have: experience with a Tier 1 carrier or large service provider, multi-vendor optical transport environments, brownfield modernisation projects, network automation, APIs, telemetry or SDN, and data-centre interconnect, cloud connectivity and AI-driven capacity needs.

Required skills

• DWDM or Layer 0 optical transport systems, optical engineering technologies or test methodologies.
• Optical link engineering, including link budgets, attenuation, chromatic dispersion and fibre characteristics.
• Working knowledge of converged packet-optical technologies (OTN, Carrier Ethernet, IP).
• Knowledge of coherent optical transmission (100G, 400G, with awareness of 800G) and optical design, planning or link-engineering tools.