Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Blue Planet Orchestration PV Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringNetwork AutomationOrchestrationTelecommunications

🎯 Role Definition

The Blue Planet Orchestration PV Engineer is a specialist responsible for validating, verifying, automating, and operationalizing Blue Planet (Ciena) orchestration solutions across multi-vendor transport and packet networks. This role blends deep domain knowledge of network orchestration, NFV/CNF lifecycle management, YANG/NETCONF/REST-based integrations, test automation and CI/CD pipelines with strong troubleshooting and stakeholder management to ensure reliable service delivery from lab validation through production onboarding.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Network Automation Engineer with scripting and orchestration experience.
  • Systems Integration or Test Engineer supporting NFV/SDN/OSS projects.
  • DevOps Engineer with telecom or network infrastructure exposure.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Orchestration / Validation Engineer
  • Orchestration Architect / Principal Engineer
  • Technical Lead for NFV/SDN or Service Orchestration
  • Product Manager (Orchestration Products) or Solutions Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • NFV Onboarding Engineer
  • Cloud Native (CNF) Automation Engineer
  • DevOps / CI-CD Engineer supporting Service Providers

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Plan, author and execute detailed functional and integration test plans for Blue Planet Orchestration features (service design, activation & assurance) across multi-vendor environments, ensuring traceability to requirements and acceptance criteria.
  • Design and implement automated test frameworks and reusable test suites (Python, PyTest, Robot Framework or bespoke frameworks) to validate Blue Planet workflows, REST/NetConf/YANG southbound adapters and northbound APIs.
  • Lead VNF/CNF onboarding and lifecycle verification on Blue Planet Orchestration including instantiation, scaling, healing, configuration, and termination scenarios in lab and pre-production environments.
  • Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/GitLab CI/ArgoCD) to automate build, test, and release of orchestration artifacts, blueprints, and adapters for faster and repeatable validation cycles.
  • Integrate Blue Planet with OSS/BSS and third-party orchestration tools via RESTful APIs, message buses (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and model-driven interfaces (NETCONF/YANG, gNMI), validating end-to-end service flows and data contracts.
  • Troubleshoot complex multi-domain orchestration failures, analyze logs and traces across Blue Planet microservices, NFV orchestration layers, and underlying infrastructure to identify root causes and recommend corrective actions.
  • Author and maintain automation scripts, test harnesses, and lab orchestration code for reproducible testbeds using Terraform, Ansible, Helm charts, and Kubernetes manifests for CNF/VNF lifecycle testing.
  • Create, normalize and validate YANG models and service blueprints; verify model-driven telemetry, configuration push/pull logic and translation into device-specific commands during orchestration.
  • Perform performance and scalability testing of orchestration components to assess throughput, latency, concurrency and stability, and produce capacity planning and tuning recommendations.
  • Conduct regression testing for orchestration releases, manage test data and fixture lifecycles, and provide release readiness reports with clear pass/fail criteria and risk assessments.
  • Define and enforce test environment provisioning and lab topology standards, coordinate rack and virtualization resources, and maintain reproducible lab images and snapshots for Blue Planet validation activities.
  • Collaborate with product management, engineering, and customer success teams to reproduce customer issues, map customer use-cases to test scenarios, and deliver timely fixes or workarounds.
  • Validate security hardening, role-based access control, and audit logging for orchestration solutions; work with security teams to ensure compliance with enterprise and telecom security policies.
  • Drive end-to-end service verification including activation, assurance (alarms/telemetry), fault injection, and service-level agreement (SLA) checks to ensure orchestration meets operational expectations.
  • Participate in design reviews and feature definition sessions to ensure testability and operational readiness are built into Blue Planet solutions early in the development lifecycle.
  • Maintain comprehensive documentation including test plans, runbooks, troubleshooting guides, onboarding manuals and knowledge base articles to accelerate team ramp-up and customer handover.
  • Automate telemetry collection and verification using model-driven telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig), ELK/Prometheus/Grafana stacks or equivalent to validate health and KPI metrics for orchestration and managed services.
  • Coordinate multi-vendor interoperability testing and manufacturer QA cycles, managing vendor fix cycles and acceptance criteria for device adapters and southbound integrations.
  • Support staging and production cutovers by running pre-deployment validation, smoke tests, and rollback procedures to minimize service impact during orchestration upgrades and feature rollouts.
  • Monitor and improve test coverage and automation rates; maintain metrics dashboard (test pass rate, defect density, automation coverage, MTTR) to drive continuous improvement in quality and delivery cadence.
  • Mentor and onboard junior validation engineers, lead knowledge-sharing sessions, and promote best practices in automation, orchestration and lab operations across teams.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to help product and operations teams understand orchestration behavior and trends.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by identifying telemetry and analytics needs from orchestration and service assurance systems.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate operational and customer requirements into engineering validation and automation tasks.
  • Participate in sprint planning, stand-ups and agile ceremonies within the orchestration and validation teams to align priorities and delivery expectations.
  • Provide after-hours or on-call support for critical orchestration incidents and escalations with clear incident reports and post-mortems.
  • Run interoperability workshops and proof-of-concept demonstrations for prospective customers and internal stakeholders to showcase orchestration capabilities.
  • Assist in license management, test tool procurement and lab inventory planning to ensure resource availability for validation activities.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep hands-on experience with Ciena Blue Planet Orchestration (configuration, workflows, Blue Planet Adapter Framework, Blueprint Designer) and related product components.
  • Strong programming/scripting skills in Python (PyTest, unittest), Bash, and experience writing maintainable automation code and test harnesses.
  • Experience with NFV/CNF lifecycle management tools and platforms (ONAP, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Helm) and VNF/CNF onboarding processes.
  • Proficiency with network management interfaces and data models: NETCONF/YANG, RESTCONF, gNMI, OpenConfig, and experience mapping YANG models to device capabilities.
  • Hands-on experience integrating and validating RESTful APIs, Webhooks, and message bus interactions (Kafka, RabbitMQ) as part of orchestration flows.
  • Solid knowledge of DevOps and CI/CD tooling including Jenkins, Git/GitLab, GitHub Actions, Artifactory, and pipeline-as-code practices for automated testing and deployment.
  • Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tools: Ansible, Terraform, Helm, and lab automation frameworks for reproducible testbeds.
  • Good understanding of core networking technologies (MPLS, L2/L3 switching, IP, BGP, OSPF, Ethernet, VLANs) and experience validating service provisioning over transport networks.
  • Test automation expertise including writing, maintaining and scaling automated test cases (functional, integration, regression, performance) and test data management.
  • Familiarity with observability stacks and telemetry: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic Stack, Fluentd, and model-driven telemetry collection/validation.
  • Experience with containerization (Docker) and microservices architecture troubleshooting and performance profiling.
  • Proficient with Linux systems administration and troubleshooting (system logs, processes, networking, package management).
  • Knowledge of software development lifecycle (SDLC) best practices, Agile methodologies, and release management in enterprise environments.
  • Experience with defect tracking and test management tools (JIRA, TestRail, HP ALM) and producing traceability matrices between requirements and test cases.
  • Understanding of security principles for orchestration systems including RBAC, TLS, secure API design, and vulnerability scanning.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for clear test reports, runbooks, and cross-team collaboration with engineering and operations.
  • Analytical problem-solver with ability to decompose complex orchestration failures into actionable root-cause analyses.
  • Customer-facing aptitude: able to gather requirements, reproduce field issues, and present technical findings to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Proactive ownership and bias for action — drives tasks to completion and escalates appropriately when timelines or quality are at risk.
  • Collaborative mindset, able to mentor junior engineers and build strong partnerships with product, engineering, and vendor teams.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance concurrent validation streams, ad-hoc emergencies and release deadlines.
  • Adaptability to fast-changing telecom environments, new protocols, and evolving automation toolchains.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications, or related technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Telecommunications, Computer Science, Networking or equivalent technical advanced degree.
  • Industry certifications (e.g., Ciena Certifications, CCNP/CCIE, Kubernetes, Certified OpenStack Administrator) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Telecommunications / Networking
  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years in network orchestration, NFV/CNF validation, or network automation roles.
Preferred: 5+ years with direct experience validating and automating orchestration platforms (Ciena Blue Planet preferred) in service provider environments, including multi-vendor integration and CI/CD-based test automation.

Explore More Careers