Consultant Sales Engineer - Partner Team

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.

Why Ciena:

Achieve your ideal career at the forefront of innovation with Ciena. We know the importance of life outside of work, which is why our employees enjoy flexible paid time off and the freedom of working remotely. Ciena empowers our teams with competitive salaries and incentives, community volunteer programs, professional development resources, and support for our mental and physical health—all experienced within a diverse and inclusive culture. To put it simply, we’re a technology company driven by our humanity.

How You Will Contribute:

As a partner-facing technical consultant, you will be focused on a select group of Strategic Solution Provider (SSP) accounts. This role requires strong knowledge of Ciena’s Optical, IP, Ethernet, XGS-PON, and NMS solutions. By building close consultative relationships with our partners, and continued knowledge transfer of our solutions, you will enable our partners to design, quote, and sell networks that best suit customer needs today and tomorrow.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work as part of a channel sales team to develop and execute partner enablement plans
  • Establish and maintain tight alignment with the Channel Account Managers (CAMs)
  • Develop technical enablement plan for each partner complementing the business plan of the CAM
  • Engage partner technical teams, including executive levels as well as individual contributors
• Ongoing cadence to enable virtual SE teams within each SSP
  • Identify and maintain a list of SEs within each partner that can design, quote, and sell our solutions
  • Leverage training materials from the Global Partner team (e.g. ACH 360)
  • Direct partner SEs to bootcamp material and online tools (Quote+, P2, and CAL)
    • Create custom presentations materials and present our solutions
  • Work alongside partner SEs to coach them in their design and quote efforts while adhering to Ciena best practices
  • Assist the partner SEs to propose network architecture solutions and help respond to RFI/ RFPs and other customer requests
  • Help partner SEs to understand how to position our solutions against the competition
• Assist with partner lab engagements
  • Develop initial and ongoing lab requirements
  • Drive lab development and test plans
• Interface with Sales and Product Management/Marketing to develop and/or propose product enhancements to meet partner requirements
• Provide updates internally to the Ciena direct SE community and others to reinforce the value of partners
• 25 - 50% travel required

Required Skills:

• Business acumen – you have detailed knowledge of Ciena’s products, the competitive landscape and an in-depth understanding of how partners function
• Collaborator – you possess the ability to leverage relationships to understand current business, available and future products, Ciena’s investment strategies and competitive differentiators
• Agility – you are readily able to manage competing and ever-changing partner priorities in a highly matrixed organization
• Communication Expertise – you can effectively tailor a message/articulate a value proposition to our partner audience to enable engagement at all levels of an organization, i.e., able to communicate a good blend of technology/networking trends, as well as business value of Ciena solutions
• Ability to Influence – you’re capable of working with internal stakeholders to drive decision-making and strategic thinking, and external partner stakeholders to influence the adoption of Ciena solutions
• Strategic Thinking – you can readily identify new business opportunities and solve complex technology issues
• Commitment to Learning – you keep abreast of the market and competition and use that information to Ciena’s advantage

Required Knowledge:

• Proven knowledge of key networking technologies (Optical, OTN, Ethernet, MPLS-TP, IP, XGS-PON, SDN & NFV) and applications (Mobility, Data Center Networking, IP/Optical architectures, Ethernet services, NMS/BSS/OSS)
• Expertise/knowledge in Coherent modems, Photonic and OTN Control planes, as well as Open Interfaces (NetConf/YANG, REST, T-API, etc)
• Detailed working knowledge of the technologies applied in Ci