You will be the infrastructure authority for Telecom BSS opportunities translating business requirements (subscriber growth, TPS/CDR volumes, latency/availability SLAs, regulatory constraints) into fit for purpose, carrier grade infrastructure solutions spanning compute, storage, networking, and security. You ll lead the technical discovery, dimensioning and TCO modeling, design and validation (PoCs), and develop BOM/BOQ and sizing calculators that de risk delivery, protect margin, and accelerate sales cycles. You ll influence C level stakeholders, partner with OEMs/ISVs/SIs, and ensure architectural integrity and operational excellence from proposal through handover.
The ideal candidate should be responsible for higher proposal win rates, accurate sizing vs. actuals, resilient designs that meet SLAs, profitable BOM/BOQ, and smooth transition to delivery/operations.
What You ll Do
Customer Discovery & Solution Design
- Lead technical discovery on prospect calls; elicit and document NFRs (availability, RTO/RPO, latency, throughput), workloads (e.g., subscribers, TPS, CDR/day, bill run windows), environments (prod/non prod), and compliance needs.
- Architect carrier grade infrastructure solutions using market leading vendors (e.g., Dell/EMC, HPE, Cisco, NetApp), aligning to BSS modules (CRM, CPQ, Product Catalog, Order Management, Mediation, Billing/Charging).
- Produce reference architectures, LLD/HLD, capacity and growth models, resiliency/DR topologies (active active/active passive, stretched clusters), and costed options (good/better/best).
- Evaluate and recommend hypervisors & container platforms (VMware vSphere/Tanzu, Kubernetes/Openshift) and backup/DR tooling.
Capacity Planning, Sizing & Performance
- Build sizing calculators (methodology + tooling) for CPU, memory, storage (capacity/IOPS/throughput), and network bandwidth parameterized by subscriber base, TPS, API concurrency, batch windows, and growth rates.
- Translate sizing outputs into vendor specific BOM/BOQ (SKUs, part numbers, licenses, support tiers), with headroom for peak loads and future growth.
- Model performance and conduct bottleneck analysis across app/database layers; recommend caching, storage tiers (NVMe/SSD/SAS), fabric options (FC/iSCSI), and LB/WAF strategies for scale and security.
Commercialization & Sales Enablement
- Own BOM/BOQ creation and validation; align with commercial/finance for pricing, TCO/ROI scenarios, and margin preservation.
- Craft proposals, technical SoWs, RFP/RFI responses, compliance matrices, and assumptions/constraints that de risk delivery.
- Deliver executive ready narratives, demos, and PoCs; handle objections; present trade offs and decision frameworks to C suite and architects.
Security, Compliance & Risk
- Map designs to security baselines (e.g., NIST/ISO 27001/SOC 2), data protection (GDPR like), keys & trust (TPM, HSM, PKI), and telecom grade segmentation and observability.
- Design backup/restore, geo redundancy, key rotation, patch windows, and change management aligned to ITIL v4.
Collaboration & Partner Ecosystem
- Collaborate with Business Development, Account Management, PMO, Delivery, and SRE/Operations to ensure feasibility and smooth handover.
- Build and maintain relationships with OEMs/ISVs/SIs for roadmap insight, deal registration, and special pricing.
- Drive new tactical engineering offerings (reference builds, validated designs, outcome based services).
Evangelism & Continuous Improvement
- Publish whitepapers, RA patterns, and sizing guides; present at trade shows and technical conferences.
- Maintain current knowledge of CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage media (NVMe), fabrics, switches, NICs, SmartNIC/DPU, and emerging architectures.
- Contribute to internal playbooks, templates, and automation that reduce cycle time and variability.
Core Technical Competencies
Compute
- x86/ARM server platforms, CPU architecture (NUMA, SMT), memory channels/DDR generations, PCIe lanes, BIOS/UEFI tuning, IPMI/iDRAC/ILO.
- Virtualization and container platforms: VMware vSphere/Tanzu, KVM, OpenStack, Kubernetes/Openshift; VM/container placement, affinity/anti affinity, overcommit.
Storage
- RAID levels, NVMe/SSD/SAS, storage fabrics (FC/iSCSI/NVMe oF), tiering/caching, snapshots/clones, replication (sync/async).
- Performance: IOPS, throughput, latency; queue depth tuning; filesystem choices (XFS, ext4, ZFS), NFS/SMB for supporting services.
Networking
- L2/L3, VLAN/VXLAN/EVPN, routing (OSPF/BGP), QoS for east west & north south flows.
- Load balancing (F5, NGINX, HAProxy), API gateways, DNS/GSLB, Anycast, multicast where applicable.
Security
- Firewalls (Palo Alto/Cisco/Check Point), WAF, IPS/IDS, micro segmentation; SIEM/SOAR integrations.
- IAM, MFA, RBAC/ABAC, TPM, HSM, FIPS 140 2/3; certificate lifecycle (PKI), secrets management, secure boot.
Virtualization, Containers & Cloud
- vSphere clusters, DRS/HA, vSAN; Tanzu, CSI/CNI; Kubernetes operators, node pools, HPA/VPA, service meshes.
- Hybrid and public clouds (Azure/AWS/GCP) for bursting/DR/backup, private connectivity (ExpressRoute/Direct Connect).
Databases & Middleware (BSS context)
- RDBMS (Oracle, PostgreSQL), cache (Redis), messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ), object stores; backup/restore and HA patterns (RAC/AlwaysOn/Patroni).
- Batch vs. real time pipelines for rating/charging/billing workloads.
Observability, Resiliency & Automation
- Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk; SLOs/SLIs, golden signals.
- Backup/DR tooling, geo redundancy, RTO/RPO testing.
- IaC & config mgmt: Terraform, Ansible; CI/CD for infra; policy as code (OPA).
Telecom BSS Domain Competencies
- Understanding of BSS domains: CRM, CPQ, Product Catalog, Order Management/Orchestration, Mediation, Billing/Charging; batch windows (bill runs), real time rating performance, and latency sensitive APIs.
- Familiarity with TM Forum (eTOM/SID/TAM) and TMF Open APIs; integration patterns with OSS and 5G core touchpoints.
- Carrier grade design principles: 99.99%+ availability, change windows, maintenance/outage planning, active active DC patterns, and regulatory retention.
Presales Process Responsibilities
- RFI/RFP leadership: response ownership, compliance matrices, risk registers, dependencies, and assumption logs.
- Workload modeling & capacity plans for current and 3 5 year horizons; translate into scalable architecture & funding asks.
- BOM/BOQ derivation with precise vendor SKUs, licensing, support (24 7/NBD/4 hour), and spares strategy.
- Cost/timeline trade off analysis and TCO/ROI presentations for executive decision making.
- Handover package to delivery/operations: HLD/LLD, runbooks, test plans, SOW, acceptance criteria.
What Would Make You a Strong Fit
- Deep knowledge of server (x86/ARM), enterprise storage, and networking equipment design, plus security controls by design.
- Working knowledge of computer architectures, components, rack builds, data center power/cooling, and hardware standards.
- Fluent with terms like RAID, NVMe, IPMI, IOPS, TPM, NIC offload, SR IOV, CPU pinning, hugepages.
- Strong Linux (RHEL/Oracle Linux/Ubuntu) and hypervisors; comfort with Kubernetes and container orchestration.
- Proven ability to build rapport, influence stakeholders, and present to C level; excellent written and verbal communication.
- Experience selling verification/design/deployment services and articulating value & risk.
- Regulatory awareness (ISO 27001/SOC 2/NIST; data protection akin to GDPR), and telco grade operational governance.
- Ability to travel up to 25%.
Qualifications & Experience
- 15+ years in enterprise infrastructure with 5+ years in Telco BSS or carrier grade presales/architecture.
- Track record creating sizing calculators, BOM/BOQ, and SoWs for multi site, mission critical workloads.
- Experience leading PoCs, performance tests, and executive briefings.
- Bachelor s/Master s in CS/EE/IT or equivalent experience.
Preferred Certifications (nice to have):
VCP (VMware), CKA/CKAD (Kubernetes), RHCE, CCNP/CCIE (Cisco), Dell/EMC Proven, NetApp NCIE, Azure/AWS Architect, ITIL v4, CISSP/CCSP, TOGAF/SAFe (for architecture/process alignment).
