Job Description
Role Summary We are seeking a Sr. Principal Architect to lead the architecture, design, and evolution of ONAPbased orchestration solutions across largescale, cloudnative telecom environments. This role serves as a technical authority for service orchestration, automation, and standardization, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, futureready, and aligned with industry standards. In addition to responsibilities in productiongrade orchestration implementation and rollout, the successful candidate will support proofofconcept (PoC) initiatives in emerging technologies, including AI/MLassisted automation, and translate successful innovations into standardized, productionready architectures. ## Key Responsibilities - Act as the technical lead for ONAPbased orchestration platforms, defining architecture, integration patterns, and lifecycle design. - Lead endtoend orchestration solutions across service design, decomposition, provisioning, configuration, and assurance. - Define and govern architectures using ONAP service orchestration concepts, policydriven automation, and APIcentric integrations. - Ensure alignment with enterprise reference architectures, provisioning standards, and operational models. - Drive/Support proofofconcept (PoC) initiatives for emerging technologies relevant to orchestration and automation - Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and architectures through structured PoCs and technical assessments. - Define success criteria, architecture patterns, and scalability considerations to transition PoCs into productiongrade solutions. - Collaborate with internal teams and suppliers to industrialize innovation outcomes aligned to platform roadmaps. - Ensure orchestration solutions align with industry standards and frameworks, including: TM Forum (Open APIs, Frameworx, SID, ODA principles), ETSI NFV and cloudnative telecom guidelines - Drive standardization of service models, APIs, workflows, and integration patterns across the orchestration ecosystem. - Balance adherence to standards with pragmatic delivery, ensuring interoperability and future extensibility. - Represent architectural positions in standardization discussions, internal governance forums, and supplier engagements. - Lead service modeling and decomposition using TOSCAbased models to enable reusable and versioned orchestration. - Define orchestration workflows, control loops, and policies to support hybrid, cloudnative, and virtualized network services. - Ensure consistency between service definitions, orchestration workflows, and runtime behavior. - Identify design gaps, integration risks, and automation inconsistencies early in the development lifecycle. - Collaborate with suppliers and internal engineering teams to convert business and operational requirements into clear technical designs. - Review and validate supplier deliverables for alignment with ONAP architecture principles, standards, and nonfunctional requirements. - Participate in architectural reviews, crossfunctional working sessions, and governance forums. - Provide architectural guidance throughout development, integration, and deployment phases. - Support the full lifecycle of orchestration capabilitiesfrom design and build through testing, UAT, production rollout, and stabilization. - Ensure solutions meet scalability, availability, performance, and security expectations. - Apply strong understanding of distributed system design, failure modes, and faulttolerant architectures. - Identify and remediate single points of failure through redundancy and scaleout strategies. - Continuously assess and optimize orchestration performance and reliability. - Drive adoption of cloudnative engineering best practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation. - Conduct architecture and code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability, and consistency with defined standards. - Produce highquality documentation including solution designs, service models, workflows, and operational guidelines. - Mentor architects and engineers, supporting capability development and technical maturity across teams. ## Qualifications & Experience (Required) - 15+ years of experience in telecom OSS, service orchestration, solution architecture, and largescale distributed systems. - Deep handson expertise with ONAP architecture, including service orchestration workflows, service modeling, policydriven automation, and APIbased integration. - Proven experience owning the endtoend development lifecycle, from architecture and design through build, CI/CD, UAT, and production rollout. - Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, SDN/NFV concepts, and endtoend service provisioning logic. - Extensive experience designing and building cloudnative, microservicesbased systems using Docker, Kubernetes, and modern container platforms. - Strong background in distributed system design, including identification and mitigation of single points of failure, high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience patterns. - Proven ability to analyze and optimize system performance, scalability, and reliability in highscale environments. - Handson experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and DevOps practices. - Strong development background in Java and/or Python, with experience across distributed and multithreaded systems (exposure to Groovy, Kotlin, or C/C++ is a plus). - Solid understanding of SOLID principles, design patterns, and scalable software architecture. - Expertise in database modeling and architecture, covering both relational and NoSQL data stores. - Ability to conduct architecture and code reviews and produce highquality technical documentation. - Handson experience with service modeling languages such as TOSCA (YANG, Netconf/RESTconf exposure is a plus). - Experience designing orchestration and integration solutions across hybrid and multicloud environments. - Strong understanding of industry standards and frameworks, particularly TM Forum and ETSIaligned architectures, with the ability to apply them pragmatically. - Contributions to opensource platforms or standards bodies are a strong plus. - Proven ability to lead innovation initiatives and proofofconcepts (PoCs), translating emerging technologies into productionready solutions. - Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into cloudnative, microservicesbased platforms to enhance orchestration, assurance, and automation. - Understanding of AI pipelines, including data ingestion, feature engineering, model inference, and feedback loops. - Familiarity with eventdriven architectures enabling AIdriven decisioning and closedloop automation. - Ability to define reference architectures for AIenabled OSS platforms, aligned with enterprise governance and industry standards. - Demonstrated leadership in vendor collaboration, architectural governance, roadmap planning, and budgetaware decisionmaking. - Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence engineering, operations, suppliers, and senior leadership. - Ability to operate effectively at both strategic and handson levels, providing architectural direction while engaging in execution when needed. - Proven experience building, mentoring, and scaling highperforming technical teams. - Forwardlooking, innovationoriented architecture mindset with strong systems thinking. - Excellent analytical and problemsolving capabilities. - Strong communication, collaboration, and decisionmaking skills. - Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fastevolving technology environments. - High attention to detail, quality orientation, and ability to perform under pressure and meet deadlines ## Preferred / Good to Have - Experience applying AI/ML techniques within orchestration, assurance, or automation domains. - Familiarity with intentbased networking and closedloop automation models. - Exposure to eventdriven architectures and streaming platforms. - Experience contributing to standards bodies, opensource initiatives, or architecture communities. - Experience working with global delivery teams and large telecom environments.
