Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Tacker Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

The Tacker Engineer is an NFV/MANO-focused cloud engineer who owns the deployment, integration and operational lifecycle of OpenStack Tacker and related MANO components. This role ensures reliable VNF onboarding, automated network service orchestration (NSD lifecycle), seamless VIM interactions (OpenStack/K8s), and production-grade observability, security and CI/CD for telco-grade cloud services. Ideal for candidates with strong OpenStack/NFV experience, automation skills, and a customer-facing mindset.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Cloud/Platform Engineer with OpenStack or Kubernetes experience
Network Engineer with NFV exposure (VNFs, virtual routers, firewalls)
DevOps / SRE with telecom or carrier-grade systems experience

Advancement To:

Senior NFV/MANO Engineer or Tacker Lead
MANO Architect or Cloud-Native Telco Architect
Engineering Manager for Cloud & NFV Platform

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Platform Engineer (OpenStack/Kubernetes)
Site Reliability Engineer focused on telco services
NFV Solution Architect / Pre-Sales Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the end-to-end design, deployment and production operation of OpenStack Tacker as the VNFM/NFVO component, ensuring high availability, scalability, and secure configuration across multi-node clusters.
Own VNF onboarding and testing: define onboarding workflows, convert VNF descriptors (VDU, VNFD), validate lifecycle operations (instantiate, scale, heal, terminate) and automate template-driven deployments using TOSCA/HEAT.
Integrate Tacker with VIMs (OpenStack, KVM, VMware) and CNF orchestrators (Kubernetes via KubeVIM/K8s VIM drivers), ensuring consistent resource allocation, tenant isolation and quota enforcement.
Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for Tacker and MANO stack using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Helm charts and container manifests to enable reproducible builds, upgrades and disaster recovery.
Design and implement CI/CD pipelines that validate Tacker changes, VNF/CNF lifecycle tests and automated regression suites using Jenkins/GitLab CI, artifact repositories and automated functional testing frameworks.
Implement robust monitoring, alerting and logging for Tacker and VNF/CNF lifecycles using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, Fluentd and distributed tracing to ensure observability and SLAs.
Troubleshoot complex production incidents involving Tacker, VNF managers and VIMs—perform root-cause analysis, create post-incident reports, and propose systemic fixes to reduce recurrence.
Collaborate with VNF vendors and internal product teams to define onboarding requirements, compatibility matrices and operational runbooks, and to perform interoperability testing and certification.
Implement and enforce security hardening for Tacker and its integrations: authentication/authorization, TLS for APIs, secrets management, vulnerability patching and compliance with telco security standards.
Optimize resource utilization, autoscaling rules and placement strategies for VNFs and NSs to meet performance, cost-efficiency and capacity planning targets in multi-tenant environments.
Maintain and extend Tacker APIs and plugins to support custom orchestration workflows and third-party integrations (billing, inventory, OSS/BSS, service assurance).
Define and maintain service templates, NSD/VDU lifecycle policies and scaling descriptors that support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, including migration strategies and blue/green upgrade procedures.
Drive platform upgrades and migration projects (Tacker versions, OpenStack releases, K8s upgrades) including compatibility testing, data migrations and rollback plans with minimal service disruption.
Build automation for lifecycle operations: scheduled health checks, automatic remediation for known failure patterns, and self-healing playbooks to meet telco uptime objectives.
Lead and participate in architecture reviews, design sessions and sprint planning to ensure MANO platform evolution aligns with product roadmaps and customer requirements.
Mentor junior engineers on NFV concepts, Tacker internals, and best practices for automation, testing and production support.
Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, onboarding guides and API reference material for internal teams and external partners.
Drive performance tuning for Tacker databases, message queues (RabbitMQ/Keystone), and compute/network overlays to address latency, throughput and scalability needs under heavy VNF loads.
Coordinate cross-team change management with network operations, security, and platform engineering to roll out new NFV services, ensuring proper rollback, testing and stakeholder communications.
Evaluate and pilot new CNF/VNF and MANO technologies (Helm-based CNF deployments, Kubernetes-native VNFM integrations) to improve automation, observability and cloud-native alignment.
Participate in project estimation, sprint scoping and delivery commitments; produce technical designs, impact analyses and risk mitigation plans for NFV initiatives.
Ensure compliance with ETSI NFV principles where applicable, and translate standards into practical implementation steps for templates, descriptors and lifecycle operations.
Act as a technical escalation point for customer issues related to service orchestration, VNF lifecycle failures, network connectivity, and orchestration performance.
Collaborate with QA to define automated test suites for VNF lifecycle validation, API contract tests, and end-to-end service orchestration tests across multi-VIM deployments.
Continuously assess and recommend improvements to platform tooling, operational processes and observability to reduce mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide hands-on support during on-call rotations and contribute to escalation plans and on-call documentation.
Assist in vendor selection, procurement evaluation and proof-of-concept testing for VNFs, CNFs and MANO-related solutions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep, hands-on experience with OpenStack and OpenStack Tacker (deployment, configuration, debugging, and upgrades).
Practical knowledge of NFV concepts and standards (ETSI NFV, TOSCA, VNFD/NSD lifecycle semantics).
Experience onboarding and operating VNFs and CNFs; familiarity with VNF packaging, descriptors and lifecycle operations.
Strong Linux systems administration (Ubuntu/CentOS), kernel tuning, networking namespaces and virtualization (KVM/QEMU).
Proficiency with automation and IaC tools: Ansible, Terraform, Helm, and container tooling (Docker, CRI-O).
Development and scripting skills in Python and Bash for automation, integration and debugging tasks.
Solid networking knowledge: OpenStack Neutron, VLAN/VXLAN, SR-IOV, routing, and service function chaining.
Familiarity with Kubernetes and its integration with MANO (KubeVIM, CNF lifecycle management).
Experience with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, ArgoCD) and test automation for orchestration and VNFs.
Expertise in observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Fluentd, and distributed tracing.
Message bus and identity services: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Keystone and API Gateway integrations.
Database administration experience (MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL) for MANO component persistence and optimization.
API design and integration experience (RESTful APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger) and knowledge of authentication/authorization best practices (OAuth, TLS).
Configuration management and release automation skills for production-grade platforms.
Experience with security hardening, vulnerability management and compliance frameworks relevant to telecom/cloud platforms.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to write clear runbooks, technical docs and stakeholder updates.
Collaborative team player who works well across product, network, QA and vendor teams.
Customer-focused mindset with experience in supporting external or internal customers through escalations.
Analytical problem-solving skills; able to perform RCA and propose durable fixes rather than band-aids.
Time management, prioritization and the ability to drive work in an Agile/Scrum environment.
Mentoring and knowledge-transfer capability for junior engineers and cross-functional teams.
Attention to detail and a strong sense of ownership across end-to-end service delivery.
Adaptability to evolving technologies (cloud-native, CNF, automation) and shifting business priorities.
Proactive mindset for continuous improvement, automation and reducing toil.
Negotiation and vendor management skills when dealing with third-party VNFs and partners.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Telecommunications, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in a related discipline or equivalent industry certifications (OpenStack Foundation, CNCF, NFV-related training).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Electrical or Telecommunications Engineering
Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems
Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years in cloud, NFV or network orchestration roles; at least 2 years working directly with OpenStack/Tacker or equivalent MANO stack.

Preferred: 5+ years of experience with NFV/MANO and production deployments, demonstrable experience onboarding VNFs/CNFs, building automation pipelines and operating large-scale telco cloud platforms.