Product Line Manager IV

About the role

The Principal Customer Technical Advocate (CTA) serves as the primary technical liaison between customers, engineering teams, delivery organizations, project management, and external contractors. The P-CTA is responsible for ensuring technical readiness, facilitating customer technical reviews, providing implementation guidance, and driving successful solution delivery. This role helps ensure alignment between customer requirements, technical execution, and project objectives throughout the service delivery lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead services readiness activities to ensure projects are technically prepared for successful execution.
• Support the creation of processes, solutions, or tools recommendations, as necessary.
• Aligning NetMod with intelligent, high-ROI automation.
• Serve as the primary customer-facing technical representative during project delivery and implementation.
• Conduct customer technical reviews, design workshops, readiness assessments, and operational planning sessions.
• Validate customer requirements and ensure they are accurately translated into engineering and delivery plans.
• Provide technical guidance and oversight to engineering teams, implementation personnel, and external contractors.
• Support project managers in managing technical scope, dependencies, risks, issues, and change requests.
• Facilitate communication and alignment between customers, engineering, operations, and project delivery teams.
• Review technical deliverables, implementation plans, acceptance criteria, and deployment readiness milestones.
• Identify technical risks and develop mitigation strategies to minimize delivery impacts.
• Monitor project progress against technical objectives and customer expectations.
• Ensure successful completion of customer acceptance testing and project handoff activities.
• Capture lessons learned and recommend process improvements to enhance delivery quality and customer satisfaction.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with customer technical stakeholders and leadership teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Telecommunications, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in technical program delivery, systems engineering, solution implementation, telecommunications, or customer-facing technical leadership roles.
• 15+ years of experience in technical program delivery, systems engineering, solution implementation, telecommunications, or customer-facing technical leadership roles.
• Experience leading customer technical reviews and coordinating cross-functional technical teams.
• Strong understanding of service delivery lifecycles, network migration, deployment, testing, and operational readiness processes.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across multiple organizations and stakeholders.
• Experience working with external contractors, vendors, and implementation partners.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and risk management skills.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and customer engagement abilities.

Core Competencies

• Customer Advocacy & Stakeholder Engagement – Serve as a trusted advisor to customers, leading technical reviews, workshops, executive briefings, and ongoing communications to ensure alignment between customer objectives and solution delivery.
• Techical Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration – Provide technical direction to engineering teams, project managers, vendors, and external contractors while driving collaboration across multiple organizations and disciplines.
• Services Readiness & Delivery Governance – Lead readiness assessments, implementation planning, validation activities, rollout execution, and governance processes to ensure successful project delivery and customer acceptance.
• Systems Integration & Network Architecture – Expertise in SD-WAN, SASE, cloud networking, hybrid cloud architectures, MPLS transport, routing technologies, DNS/GSLB, and multi-vendor systems integration.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Transformation – Support cloud migration initiatives, AWS Direct Connect integration, OpenStack environments, VMware-to-cloud transitions, and hybrid cloud deployment strategies.
• Automation, DevOps & Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Drive operational efficiency through automation using Ansible, Python, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub, REST APIs, and infrastructure-as-code methodologies.
• Technical Review, Validation & Production Readiness – Oversee sandbox testing, field operational assessments, solution validation, performance benchmarking, production readiness reviews, and deployment acceptance activities.
• Observability, Performance & Risk Management – Establish telemetry, monitoring, and performance validation frameworks while proactively identifying technical risks and implementing mitigation strategies.
• Governance, Security & Compliance – Ensure adherence to security, audit, RBAC, SOX, and operational governance requirements through standardized architectures, controls, and best practices.
• Continuous Improvement & Operational Excellence – Leverage lessons learned, performance metrics, and customer feedback to improve delivery processes, solution quality, scalability, and long-term operational success.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with wireless, telecommunications, 5G, ORAN, networking, cloud, or infrastructure solutions.
• Familiarity with project and program management methodologies.
• Experience supporting large-scale customer deployments and multi-vendor environments.
• PMP, ITIL, Agile, or related certifications.