Customer Engagement Manager

Ciena is committed to our people-first philosophy. Our teams enjoy a culture focused on prioritizing a personalized and flexible work environment that empowers an individual’s passions, growth, wellbeing and belonging. We’re a technology company that leads with our humanity—driving our business priorities alongside meaningful social, community, and societal impact.

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Why Ciena:

• We are big proponents of life-work integration and provide the flexibility and tools to make it a reality with remote work and potentially, part-time work.
• We believe an inclusive, diverse, and barrier-free work environment makes for empowered and committed employees.
• We recognize the importance of well-being and offer programs and benefits to support and sustain the mental and physical health of our employees and their families and also offer a variety of paid family leave programs.
• We are committed to employee development, offering tuition reimbursement and a variety of in-house learning and mentorship opportunities.
• We know that financial security is important.  We offer competitive salaries and incentive programs, RSU’s (job level specific) and an employee share option purchase program.
• We realize time away to recharge is important.  We offer flexible paid time off!
• Great work deserves recognition. We have a robust recognition program, with ongoing and enhanced awards for exemplary performance.

How You Will Contribute:

Reporting to Senior Manager, Customer Support Operations, as the Customer Engagement Manager you will be responsible for bring the delivery success of the practice. You will drive multiple aspects of customer projects interacting with customers, colleagues, suppliers, and partners. You will be engaged in both solutioning and delivery toward successful customer projects providing value to our clients with excellent customer experience. Our team will benefit from your customer focus, cross-functional collaboration, attention to detail, business acumen, and professionalism.

• Drive on boarding Managed Service delivery projects from reception of a quote to turn up of the services and monthly reporting of performance against our goals.
• Responsible for project scope delivery adhering to and optimizing schedule, costs, and resources. Projects include Ciena, partner, and third-party deliverables.
• Act as the counterpart for customer’s program leader to ensure customer satisfaction and be the escalation point for managed service delivery activities.
• Be the hands-on-project manager for multiple projects.
• Prepare and present executive level project communications project tracking and stakeholder management.
• Identify, manage, and mitigate project risks.
• Collaborate with colleagues in Services, product teams, supply-chain, and sales.

What Does Ciena Expect of You?

• Initiative – you’re a self-starter who works with limited direction and is committed to delivering against aggressive deadlines.
• A customer first mentality – what’s important to the customer is also important to you.
• Agility – with an ability to flex between the strategic and tactical, you manage competing and ever-changing priorities and maintain a balanced and methodical approach to problem solving.

• Communication expertise – you possess the ability to tailor your message and ideas to the audience to ensure understanding and consensus.
• The flexibility to work independently and as part of a broader team – you thrive in a team environment, are comfortable working independently, and know how to get things done in a virtual environment.
• Relationship builder – with a proven ability to influence at all levels, you’re able to quickly develop trusted connections and get work done through others.
• A commitment to innovation – you keep abreast of competitive developments and are always keen to formulate new ideas and problem solve.

The Must Haves:

• The successful applicant for this role will have 8+ years of relevant experience working in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) field with prior responsibilities in program/project management roles for managed services of optical, cloud or virtualization delivery projects.
• Strong negotiation skills to work with customers and resource owners. Ability to mentor and lead by influence and collaboration.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation communications skills. Strong quantitative skills. Attention to statement of work details. Customer and partner facing skills.
• Bring high energy customer-focus to the organization. Self-motivated to drive success based on organizational goals.
• Monitor incident management to ensure timely resolution with SLAs.
• Provide customers with updates on “hot” or escalated incidents.
• Coordinate technical support to lead operational issues and customer needs, to ensure service delivery meets customer expectations and SLAs.
• Manage quality communication with the customer, develop, implement, and monitor processes to increase customer satisfaction.
• Follow up on open action items timely manner and ensure commitments are met.
• Oversee the coordination of field engineers in different locations to perform physical maintenance or fix critical issues on equipment.
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, business or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated skills in desktop applications as well as project management and financial tools.
• The ability to travel to support customer projects.
• Position can be located at a Ciena office or in proximity to a customer/technology hub city in North America.

Assets: 

• Experience with managed services and build-operate-transfer projects is a plus.
• PMP certification is a plus along with virtualization and networking technology certifications.
• MS or MBA is valuable.
• Experience with multivendor and software professional services for communication service provider or enterprise customers is preferred.
• ITIL v4/6 Foundation ITSM Certification.
• Service Provider experience is highly desirable.

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