Network Engineer III - Optical (WaaS)

Company Description

Zayo provides mission-critical bandwidth to the world’s most impactful companies, fueling the innovations that are transforming our society. Zayo’s 141,000-mile network in North America and Europe includes extensive metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers. Zayo’s communications infrastructure solutions include dark fiber, private data networks, wavelengths, Ethernet, and dedicated Internet access. Zayo serves wireless and wireline carriers, media, tech, content, finance, healthcare and other large enterprises.

Our Network Engineer III - Optical (WaaS) position is responsible for designing, link engineering, and implementing capacity onto the existing DWDM network, with a specific focus on supporting Zayo’s Waves as a Service (WAAS) initiative.

This role plays a critical part in Zayo’s automation strategy, ensuring that network designs are optimized for automated provisioning and high-velocity service delivery. The successful candidate will balance traditional optical engineering excellence with a forward-thinking approach to network innovation and efficiency.

This role is also responsible for effectively communicating with internal order management personnel and various cross-functional teams on the progress of capacity fulfillment. The Network Engineer III is responsible for meeting/exceeding daily and weekly performance targets while actively contributing to the development of automated tooling and standardized design practices that reduce the level of effort for wavelength delivery.

Responsibilities: 

• Responsible for design planning, record creation, and capacity fulfillment throughout the U.S. and Canadian networks, ensuring designs align with WAAS automation standards.

• Works with Project Managers to effectively deliver service requirements to customers. 

• Designs DWDM network per Network Architecture standards, ensuring scalability for future growth and compatibility with automated workflows.

• Provides timely updates to project managers and leadership for service deliverables, due dates, and automation project milestones. 

• Reviews capacity requests for correctness and identifies opportunities to improve data integrity within inventory systems to support automated provisioning.

• Maintains specific customer commitments and deadlines in the Zayo (Salesforce or future system used) database.  

• Provides support to field operations to resolve provisioning problems; reviews and verifies technical data in an effort to project issues.    

• Opens, forecasts, and maintains a budget based off of the service commitments. 

• Secures quotes from our optical vendors, orders equipment, moves equipment from inventory to the field, writes scopes of works for installation of equipment. 

• Exercises interpersonal skills in working with all internal customers. 

• Performs other related duties or projects as assigned by management. 

• Manages workload to identify critical issues and prioritize those items that must be completed daily. 

• Works around obstacles and roadblocks within the order flow to obtain the priority required by Zayo to meet required due dates.  Shows initiative in getting work done. 

• Participates in user acceptance testing (UAT) for new automation tools and provides feedback to development teams to improve the engineering user experience.

• Supports manager during customer or network escalations as requested. 

• Performs other miscellaneous duties, including staying abreast of emerging optical technologies and network automation solutions.

Qualifications: 

• Requires the ability to meet inflexible deadlines; perform non-predictive multiple tasks; and handle customer conflict to a successful resolution.  

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.  

• Working