Customer Solutions Design Specialist

Job Description

Recruiter: Smriti Pal

Hiring Manager: Awes Fahmi

Career Grade: D

About the role
• Customer partner - You put the customer first, promoting the breadth of services. Looks to fully understand the customers’ needs and align relevant solutions, taking ownership of issues and resolving them in a timely manner and methodical approach.
• Continuous improver - You question current processes, trying to change and work smarter. You try new approaches or ideas, seeking to understand the benefits and opportunities that they offer and lead on specific challenges.
• Active learner - You're quick to learn from experience and mistakes, readily applying new knowledge to the next challenge. You accept feedback and develop your self-awareness.
• Team player - You navigate relationships openly and honestly. You share knowledge and information to directly benefit or support others and play a leading part in the development of those working with you.

What you will be doing (Role Accountabilities)
• Provides technical concurrence and sign off for high profile and/or critical network changes on major BT core platforms and/or customer bids; accountable for managing technical risk for major platforms.
• Provides consultancy on network designs for multiple platforms and/or solutions and/or customers
• Develops design patterns across multiple domains.
• Responsible for establishing design best practice within a unit.
• Responsible for estimating the time and type of resource needed to support deliverables for complex, high impact and high value projects.
• Drives Right First-Time solutions and leads lessons learned
• Proposes technical strategy to network platforms and/or customer solutions factoring in high impact and high risk as appropriate.
• Drives efficiency and scalability through the re-use of network designs and accountable for the design whilst it is deployed across the overall network platform and/or customer solution.
• Potentially leads a large matrix team (virtual) and is accountable for complex network development using innovative approaches to design (including cross-portfolio solutions). Leverages technical resource/s as required to deliver the solution.
• Decides on design scope and design to leading edge high impact and high-risk network platforms and/or customer solutions
• Decides on the time and type of resource needed to support deliverables for complex, high impact and high value projects.
• Provide design authority for complex solutions and/or platform designs.
• Decides on network models for design testing.
• Decides on approach to resolving customer affected issues to leading edge high impact and high-risk network platforms and/or customer solutions, as appropriate.
• Resolves in-life issues to high risk and high impact network platforms and/or customer solutions, as appropriate
• Decides how to re-use network designs.
• Decides on implementation approaches of technology related transformation activity.
• Lead the development work on one or more products from the product portfolio making sure that the development stories are completed on time.
• Help to identify minimum data fields (across all stages) required from both customer and inventory systems from a technical designer perspective• Assistance in stitching the process together by considering data flow between the Receive Request and Technical Design Service Elements in the SR workflow and similarly cover the other stages of the workflow.• Identifying dependencies and system integration required to build the workflow and work with appropriate teams to get the same implemented. `• May lead technical design output from level 1, 2, 3, or 4 designers and/or third-party resources. • May lead a large matrix team of technical experts.• Ability to support multiple customer domains across one or more technologies• Provides strong influence on senior stakeholders in terms of technical direction of platforms, which will influence commercial direction. • Likely to lead on significant vendor selection for one or two domains.

What you’ll need to succeed (Skills & Experience)
• Minimum 10 years of relevant experience in network domain
• Strong understanding of IP Networking and it’s future direction
• CCNP/CCIE or equivalent desirable
• Strong understanding of software defined networking (SDN) including specialist in at least one key area (SD-WAN-Fortinet/Cisco/Meraki)
• Minimum 2-3 years of hand on experience in SDWAN e.g. Cisco, Meraki or Fortinet.
• In-depth understanding of different vendor products like Cisco and Juniper.
• Experience with one of the public cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Good understanding of hybrid cloud architecture.
• Good understanding of ISE.
• Good to have working experience on enterprise and datacentre design.
• Good understanding on the Cisco/Aruba WLAN technology.
• Knowledge of virtualisation tools and concepts
• Good understanding on Load balancers like F5, NetScaler
• Knowledge on UCS/Virtualization, Python, JSON programming would be an added advantage.
• Key achievements in technical expertise on his/her domain.

About the role

The Customer Solutions Design Specialist independently executes a range of workstreams in the creation of end-to-end technical designs, ensuring that business requirements are successful translated into deliverable solutions, which meet customer needs whilst considering the impact of those solutions on all technical and business areas.

What you’ll be doing

1. Captures detailed customer technical requirements and translation to detailed solution design in accordance with design methodologies.
2. Manages and recommends on the technical direction and helps determine the optimum solution design for customers.
3. Manages the review and validation processes for both new developments and in-life products and services, ensuring full integration across all aspects, considering the broad impact of solutions on the product roadmap.
4. Drives the improvement of design and delivery capabilities for end-to-end technical solutions.
5. Manages customer solution design engagement and statement of work creation, including any 3rd party deliverables.
6. Facilitates the development of strong customer relationships at the senior level through providing specialist service design expertise, and influencing the customer's service strategy and operational decisions.
7. Drives consistency in architecture and technical processes, with the aim of reducing costs and increasing productivity.
8. Undertakes customer migration planning and implementation.
9. Coordinates impact assessments and design documentation updates.
10. Resolves complex solution and service issues, leads root cause analysis, troubleshooting and escalation.
11. Pursues the identification of potential risks and the implementation of controls and mitigations, ensuring compliance with relevant industry and company policies.
12. Ensures the delivery of thought leadership in complex bids and agreeing strategic approach as part of customer solution design.
13. Mentors other customer solution designers, helping to improve the team's abilities by acting as a technical resource.
14. Champions, continuously develops and shares with team knowledge on emerging trends and changes in customer solution design.

Essential Skills / Experience

Desirable Skills / Experience

Our Package

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.