Define and lead end-to-end network validation strategies across network operating systems, routing features, hardware platforms, configurations, and automation services, covering unit, integration, virtual lab, physical lab, canary, and production environments. Architect extensible, vendor-agnostic testing frameworks to validate control-plane convergence, data-plane behavior, failure recovery, scalability, performance, interoperability, upgrade and downgrade safety, and platform stability across multi-vendor networks. Establish risk-based quality standards and release-readiness criteria, including test coverage, quality gates, regression requirements, reproducible lab environments, and reusable tests and safeguards derived from production incidents and defects. Provide technical leadership for complex network failures and live-site incidents, using telemetry, packet captures, logs, protocol state, topology, and hardware signals to isolate issues, identify systemic failure patterns, and drive corrective actions. Define and improve network operational readiness and reliability, including telemetry, alerting, service-level indicators, troubleshooting, rollback, post-deployment validation, capacity analysis, self-healing mechanisms, and secure escalation processes. Architect and build network automation and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems, including source of truth, intent and metadata as code, automated validation, progressive deployment, health gates, rollback, drift detection, reconciliation, and operational automation. Provide technical leadership across teams, driving high-impact architectural decisions, aligning engineering, operations, security, and vendor stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and establishing standards for code quality, observability, testing, documentation, configuration management, and service ownership. Define and execute an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for network engineering, applying AI capabilities to improve engineering efficiency, network operations, troubleshooting, automation, reliability, and measurable operational outcomes. Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation OR equivalent experience. 3+ years experience delivering network designs into production and experience with live site accountability for a network. 1+ year(s) experience developing quality management programs.