Senior Optical Transport Engineer – Long Haul Backbone

The Select Group; Mount Laurel Township (NJ); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

The Select Group is seeking a Senior Optical Transport Engineer – Long Haul Backbone for a long-term contract, focused on backbone wavelength services across a large carrier network. The role is hybrid with onsite four days per week in Mount Laurel, NJ or Denver, CO.

You will own end-to-end design, provisioning, testing, and acceptance of multi-vendor DWDM services, working across Nokia and Ciena platforms, and collaborating with operations and customers to ensure production-ready deployments.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

DWDM

ROADM

Wavelength planning

Optical amplification

Dispersion

OSNR

Vendor provisioning

Multi-vendor troubleshooting

Nokia 1830

Ciena 6500

Tools

Nokia 1830 PSS/PSD/PSI-M

Ciena 6500

Waveserver

RLS platform

Job description

The Select Group is seeking a Senior Optical Transport Engineer – Long Haul Backbone for a long-term contract, focused on backbone wavelength services across a large carrier network. The role is hybrid with onsite four days per week in Mount Laurel, NJ or Denver, CO.

You will own end-to-end design, provisioning, testing, and acceptance of multi-vendor DWDM services, working across Nokia and Ciena platforms, and collaborating with operations and customers to ensure production-ready deployments.