Sr Transport Engineer, Long Haul Wave

Senior Optical Transport Engineer – Long Haul Backbone (Mount Laurel, NJ// Denver, CO)

We are seeking a Senior Optical Transport Engineer – Long Haul Backbone for a long-term contract engagement supporting the design, delivery, and activation of backbone wavelength services across a large-scale carrier network. This is a hybrid role requiring onsite presence four days per week in either New Jersey or Colorado
.

In this role, you will own the complete lifecycle of backbone wavelength services—from initial feasibility analysis and end-to-end path design through provisioning, validation, testing, customer turn-up, and final service acceptance. You'll be responsible for engineering and delivering high-capacity optical transport services across multi-vendor DWDM networks while ensuring performance, reliability, and operational excellence.

This position follows a single-owner delivery model
, where one engineer is accountable for the entire circuit throughout its lifecycle. Rather than handing work off between separate design, provisioning, and testing teams, you will maintain end-to-end ownership across every network segment, including metro ingress, the national backbone, and metro egress, ensuring each service is fully validated and production-ready before customer acceptance.

• 10+ years of hands-on experience engineering, provisioning, or supporting DWDM and optical transport networks in a carrier or large-scale service provider environment.
• Strong understanding of optical transport technologies, including DWDM, ROADM architectures, wavelength planning, optical amplification, regeneration, OSNR, dispersion, and optical power budgets.
• Hands-on experience provisioning and troubleshooting services on optical transport equipment from at least one major vendor, with the ability to work across multiple vendor platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot end-to-end circuits across multiple network segments while isolating faults within complex multi-vendor environments.
• Strong documentation skills and the ability to work directly with customers, operations teams, field personnel, and vendor support organizations throughout the service delivery process.

• Direct experience with Nokia 1830 PSS, PSD, PSI-M, and related optical transport platforms.
• Direct experience with Ciena 6500, Waveserver, and RLS optical platforms.
• Experience supporting long haul or backbone optical transport networks.
• Familiarity with optical network management and orchestration systems.
• Experience performing optical service turn-up, customer acceptance testing, and production implementations.

• Perform end-to-end feasibility studies and path design for backbone wavelength services, including route selection, regeneration requirements, optical amplification, and reach validation.
• Engineer optical spectrum across the complete path, including wavelength assignment, fixed-grid and flex-grid alignment, and spectrum utilization to maximize backbone efficiency while preserving future capacity.
• Select the appropriate transponder, muxponder, and line-side hardware based on service rate, reach, and platform requirements.
• Validate optical performance against engineering standards before implementation and identify any constraints requiring hardware additions or path modifications.
• Document the complete service design, including intermediate sites, equipment, ports, and circuit routing.

• Provision end-to-end wavelength services across a multi-vendor optical network consisting of Nokia and Ciena transport platforms.
• Configure and turn up services on Nokia optical transport platforms, including the 1830 PSS, PSD, PSI-M family, and…