Principal Product Manager, AI-Ready Data Center Networks

Lumen; Indianapolis (IN); Remote; USD 152,000 - 223,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Life insurance

Voluntary benefits

Job summary

Lumen is the trusted network for the AI‑powered world, connecting people, data, and applications through our expansive fiber network and connected ecosystem. We enable secure, high‑performance connectivity across cloud, edge, and AI workloads for enterprises, governments, and communities.

At Lumen, you’ll work on infrastructure customers rely on today and build for what’s next, where performance, security, and resilience matter.

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of experience in product management, program management, network planning, or network engineering.
• 3+ years of experience supporting metro, data center, optical, packet transport, or related network infrastructure.
• Strong knowledge of metro network architecture, including ring and mesh topologies, route and fiber diversity, point-of-presence and colocation siting, and protection and restoration strategies.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex, cross-functional technical programs through planning, decision-making, and delivery.
• Ability to build and defend quantitative demand, investment, and return-on-investment models using incomplete or evolving data.
• Understanding of capital economics, including capital and operating expense trade-offs, payback, internal rate of return, utilization, and unit cost.
• Experience translating complex technical and financial analysis into concise, decision-ready recommendations for senior leaders.
• Ability to influence across Product, Engineering, Planning, Finance, Operations, and Sales in a matrixed environment.

Responsibilities

• Own the product strategy, requirements, and multi-year architectural roadmap for data center metro network solutions and expansion programs.
• Translate topology, diversity, capacity, transport, optical-layer, and point-of-presence decisions into repeatable configurations and reference designs.
• Lead cross-functional expansion programs from evaluation through delivery, coordinating teams, dependencies, milestones, risks, and executive status reporting.
• Evaluate proposed network investments using demand, utilization, capital efficiency, revenue potential, and return-on-investment analysis.
• Establish a consistent framework for prioritizing, approving, deferring, or redesigning metro network upgrades and expansion efforts.
• Build demand models that combine contracted demand, pipeline, market signals, customer architecture plans, and forecast scenarios.
• Assess whether existing internal products and architectural solutions remain the right platforms for future growth, including lower-cost alternatives and associated trade-offs.
• Partner with Product, Network Planning, Engineering, Finance, Operations, Service Delivery, and Sales to drive decisions and execution.

Skills

Product management

Program management

Network planning

Network engineering

Education

MBA or engineering degree

Tools

Power BI

Excel

SQL

Python

Job description

Lumen is the trusted network for the AI‑powered world, connecting people, data, and applications through our expansive fiber network and connected ecosystem. We enable secure, high‑performance connectivity across cloud, edge, and AI workloads for enterprises, governments, and communities.

At Lumen, you’ll work on infrastructure customers rely on today and build for what’s next, where performance, security, and resilience matter.