Network Engineering Manager, Core and Optical Transport

At GFiber, we believe that great internet has the power to drive innovation, strengthen communities, enable the impossible, and do all the everyday things that make all of our world go round. And the job of creating better internet is never done - so we’re growing! Our team is committed to building a place where people who want to make a difference can grow their careers and find their spot to belong.

GFiber is an Alphabet company that brings Google Fiber and Google Fiber Webpass internet services to homes and businesses across the United States. Our teams are expanding as we connect more cities and people to exceptional internet.

The application window will be open until at least July 12th, 2026. This opportunity will remain online based on business needs which may be before or after the specified date.

Role Description

The Network Engineering team owns the architecture and design of GFiber’s wireline and wireless networks. We are looking for a Network Engineering Manager to lead the Core & Optical Transport team.

In this role, you will lead the engineering behind GFiber’s nationwide multi-terabit backbone owning reliability, capacity planning, observability, and automation across a multi-vendor backbone. This is a senior technical role with team leadership responsibilities: you’ll set technical direction for a small team of network engineers while staying hands-on in design and code.

In this job, you’ll:

• Oversee and review network designs to ensure best practices and resolve complex challenges. Own GFiber backbone design, reliability, traffic engineering and capacity planning across IP and optical layers.
• Drive observability strategy and telemetry pipelines (SNMP, gNMI/Streaming Telemetry, IPFIX), optical performance monitoring, and the tooling that turns network state into actionable signal.
• Plan and engineer metro and long-haul optical transport: capacity growth, wavelength planning, and modernization of the DWDM line system.
• Set and communicate team priorities that support the broader organization’s goals. Align strategy, processes, and decision-making across teams.
• Set clear expectations with individuals based on their level and role and aligned to the broader organization’s goals.
• Develop the long-term technical goals and roadmap within, and often beyond, the scope of your teams. Evolve the roadmap to meet anticipated future requirements and infrastructure needs.

At a minimum, we would like you to have:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 10 years of experience building and developing large-scale infrastructure, networks or distributed systems, including at least 3 years in a technical people management role.
• ISP/carrier backbone experience: routing, switching, traffic engineering and capacity modeling at scale across multi-vendor platforms (Juniper, Nokia, Cisco or equivalent).
• Optical transport expertise: direct design and operation of DWDM metro and long-haul networks — coherent optics, ROADM/Optical Line System architecture, OTN, and optical capacity and planning.
• Software engineering skills applied to network automation and tooling beyond  scripting. Direct experience programming in GO and/or Python, building automation systems that other engineers depend on.
• Experience with modern network observability: streaming telemetry, network performance data analytics, and deep understanding of the tradeoffs involved in designing an observability pipeline.

It’s preferred that you have:

• Experience with building end to end automation workflows and event driven automation concepts.
• Familiarity with implementing Network Reliability Engineering (NRE) principles within a ne…