CX Engineer - SMF / 5G Seattle - WA - Washington

Role Overview

Cisco is looking for an experienced [10+] consulting engineer supporting a customer lab in the 4G5G domain is expected to have a combination of technical expertise, operational skills, and customer engagement capabilities tailored to the complexities of 4G and 5G network technologies.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on expertise understanding of 4G and 5G technologies: Knowledge of 3GPP3GPP2 standards, including 5G SANSA architectures, Service-Based Architecture (SBA), Service Mesh, network functions (AMF, SMF, UPF, PCF), network slicing, VPP, Data modeling technique like fragmentation, p2p and content filtering.

This is a customer-facing technical role requiring the engineer to work closely with telecom customers during software upgrades, network expansions, new deployments, migrations, feature introductions, troubleshooting, and production change activities.

The engineer will act as a trusted technical advisor to customers and will collaborate closely with Cisco engineering, system test, TAC, deployment, and account teams to ensure successful delivery and operation of mission-critical mobile packet core networks.

Key Responsibilities

- Customer Engagement & Technical Ownership

- SMF Deployment & Integration

- Software Upgrade & Migration

- System Test & Solution Validation

- Troubleshooting & Problem Resolution

- Technical Documentation

- Required Technical Skills

- Deep understanding of 4G and 5G technologies: Knowledge of 3GPP3GPP2 standards, including 5G SANSA architectures, Service-Based Architecture (SBA), Service Mesh, network functions (AMF, SMF, UPF, PCF), network slicing, VPP, Data modeling technique like fragmentation, p2p and content filtering.

- Network function virtualization and cloud-native technologies: Ability to work with NFVI, virtualization, and cloud-native deployments, working experience of Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift and microservices.

- Networking knowledge: Strong in layer 23 networking, strong knowledge of BGP, BFD, IS-IS, OSPF and static routes.

- Test automation and release management: Skill in automated testing, python3, unix, shell scripting.

- System Engineering: Scaling testing, System Engineering, Performance and Call model

- Strong knowledge of 3GPP 4G 5G architecture and hands-on expertise

- Strong understanding of interfaces and protocols

- Experience troubleshooting platform health including:

- CPU and memory

- Cardcomponent status

- Session utilization

- Service utilization

- System alarms

- Crashes

- Bulk statistics

- Logs and traces

- Strong understanding of:

- IPv4 IPv6

- TCPIP

- Routing

- VLANs

- VRFs

- BGP

- OSPF

- Static routing

- ECMP

- NAT

- DNS

- IP addressing and subnetting

- Ability to troubleshoot end-to-end packet flow from the mobile subscriber through the EPC toward external data networks.

- Customer-Facing Skills

- The candidate must have strong customer interaction experience and demonstrate:

- Excellent verbal and written communication.

- Ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to both engineering and management audiences.

- Confidence leading technical discussions with Tier-1 telecom operators.

- Ability to manage high-pressure production situations.

- Strong ownership and accountability.

- Ability to coordinate across geographically distributed teams.

- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.

- Ability to prioritize activities during customer-impacting incidents.

Preferred Experience

- Approximately 10+ years of telecom mobile packet core experience.

- At least 5+ years of hands-on experience with network functions (AMF, SMF, UPF, PCF)is highly desirable.

- Experience with 4G EPC PGW deployments.

- Experience supporting large Tier-1 or Tier-2 telecom service providers.

- Hands-on experience performing production software upgrades.

- Experience executing complex network changes during maintenance windows.

- Experience troubleshooting live subscriber-impacting issues.

- Experience working with TAC, engineering, development, and system-test organizations.

- Experience with large subscriber-scale mobile networks.

- Exposure to the following would be advantageous:

- 5G NSA architecture

- 5G Core UPF

- CUPS

- Virtualized packet core

- Cloud-native mobile core

- VMware OpenStack Kubernetes environments

Education

Bachelors or Masters degree in:

- Electronics and Communication Engineering

- Telecommunications

- Computer Science

- Information Technology or equivalent relevant industry experience.