The Future Infrastructure Group (FIG) works ahead of what member operators run in production today. FIG builds reference architectures and working implementations, proves them in the lab and in member field trials, and carries the results into specifications or member deployment. Current functional areas are causal and network intelligence, context-aware networks, network APIs and programmability, AI interoperability, and zero-touch device onboarding across Wi-Fi and low-power wireless for industrial IoT. The group is small enough that each role owns projects outright rather than a slice of them.
The Lead Solutions Architect owns one or more FIG efforts from architecture through demonstrated result, carrying the technical design, the project schedule, and the working relationships on both sides of the ecosystem. Member operators set the requirements, provide the network conditions and data the work has to hold up against, and decide whether any of it gets deployed; vendors build to the architecture and supply what a proof of concept runs on. Roughly half of the role is technical design - the rest is the engagement work that determines whether the technical output gets used. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports, reporting to the Senior Director, Future Infrastructure Group.
We are looking for a technologist with real depth in Wi-Fi and enough breadth across access networks, gateway platforms, telemetry, applied machine learning, and network APIs to hold a credible technical conversation with both member operators and vendors - someone who can take a member's description of a symptom and turn it into a requirement, an architecture, and a validated result.
- Define the architecture for assigned projects, including component design, interfaces, data models, and the assumptions the design makes about operator networks.
- Turn member operational problems into a problem statement and an architecture, and document design tradeoffs where member requirements, vendor capability, and standards direction do not line up.
- Direct or build proof-of-concept implementations that demonstrate the architecture in a lab environment.
- Set technical direction for the contractors and internal engineers assigned to the project and review their output against the architecture.
- Act as the technical point of contact for member operators, gathering requirements from member engineering and operations teams and reconciling them where members disagree or network conditions differ.
- Build the case for member participation - lab access, field trial sites, and access to production telemetry or longitudinal datasets - and run recurring technical working sessions with member participants.
- Recruit vendors and partners into trials and proofs of concept, convert member requirements into specifications a vendor engineering team can build against, and hold vendors to agreed scope and schedule.
- Represent the project in standards bodies and industry forums where there is a specification path, and assess vendor platforms and product claims against what the architecture needs.
- Own the project plan on a Gate 1 / Gate 2 / Gate 3 cadence, carry projects to a validated result with documentation and a defined handoff, and raise scope or schedule risk early with a recommendation attached.
Qualifications
What Is a Must Have:
- Seven or more years in network architecture, systems engineering, or software architecture, including time leading technical projects that involved organizations outside your own.
- Demonstrated ownership of a project from concept through a validated implementation.
What Will Set You Apart:
- Master's degree in a technical field relevant to the role.
- Direct experience working with network operators - from inside an operator, from a vendor serving them, or from a consortium or standards organization. Cable background is a plus.
- Familiarity with how operators evaluate and adopt new capability, including the internal approvals and operational readiness work that sits between a successful trial and a production rollout.
- Standards participation: CableLabs, SCTE, IETF, 3GPP, ETSI, Mplify (formerly MEF), or TM Forum.
- Working knowledge of 802.11 standards activity and Wi-Fi Alliance certification programs; exposure to 802.11ah and Wi-Fi HaLow, given the group's IoT work.
- Depth in Wi-Fi - Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7, multi-AP and mesh deployments, and Wi-Fi quality of experience instrumentation
- Experience running lab or field trials with operators.
- Patents or published technical work.
- Equivalent practical experience may be substituted for the formal education requirement.
- Ability to travel up to 20% when needed