Senior Optical Network Engineer II
CoreWeave· Technology
Livingston, NJ$165k - $220k + equity + bonusfull-timePosted 4w ago
About the role
Senior-level optical network engineering role to design, build, operate, and evolve CoreWeave’s global optical backbone. Hands-on responsibility across the optical lifecycle—from dark fiber and photonic engineering to DWDM system design, deployment, automation, monitoring, and production operations—working to ensure integrated optical and IP layer design, capacity, diversity, resiliency, and observability.
Responsibilities
- Design, engineer and operate long-haul, metro, and data-center interconnect optical networks.
- Engineer DWDM systems across dark-fiber infrastructure.
- Design optical paths including amplification, regeneration, wavelength planning, spectrum allocation, and optical power budgets.
- Engineer and operate C-band and L-band optical systems.
- Deploy, configure, operate, and troubleshoot Nokia, Ciena and other optical platforms.
- Commission new fiber spans, wavelengths, and optical systems.
- Perform fiber characterization and validate new dark-fiber routes before production deployment.
- Analyze span loss, connector loss, reflectance, dispersion, OSNR, Q-factor/Q-margin, BER, and other optical performance characteristics.
- Troubleshoot complex optical impairments and fiber-related issues using platform telemetry and appropriate optical test equipment.
- Design amplifier chains and understand EDFA and Raman amplification requirements.
- Engineer coherent optical transmission across metro and long-haul networks.
- Plan and execute network capacity expansions.
- Develop standards for optical network architecture, deployment, commissioning, and operations.
- Build monitoring and telemetry that identifies optical degradation before it becomes a production-impacting failure.
- Participate in incident response and root-cause analysis for optical network events.
- Work directly with dark-fiber providers, carriers, data-center operators, and equipment vendors.
- Evaluate and qualify new optical platforms, coherent optics, and photonic technologies.
- Develop automation and tooling that allows the optical network to scale without equivalent growth in manual operational work.
- Mentor other engineers and help establish the technical standards and engineering culture of a new optical networking team.
Qualifications
- Strong hands-on experience with both Ciena and Nokia optical networking platforms (production deployment, configuration, troubleshooting, software lifecycle, hardware troubleshooting, and operational support).
- Extensive experience with dark-fiber networks, including fiber characterization and acceptance testing, optical loss budgets, ILA site design, OTDR testing and interpretation, connector and splice loss, reflectance and ORL, chromatic dispersion, polarization-related impairments, fiber types and characteristics, physical route diversity and shared-risk analysis, and troubleshooting degraded and failed fiber spans.
- Deep understanding of DWDM and optical transmission technologies (coherent transmission, C-band and L-band systems, ROADMs, EDFAs and Raman amplification, coherent pluggable optics, 400G/800G, ZR/ZR+, FEC, OSNR/ESNR, Q-factor/Q-margin, PMD/PDL, optical power management, wavelength/spectrum planning, amplification and regeneration, alien wavelengths, multi-vendor environments).
- Comfortable turning a proposed dark-fiber route into a production optical system.
- Hands-on experience with optical platforms from Ciena (Waveserver, 6500/RLS or similar) and Nokia optical transport / photonic systems.
- Experience designing and operating multi-vendor optical environments is highly desirable.
- Preferred: IP networking experience (understanding impact of optical in large IP backbones and failure propagation between layers), familiarity with BGP/IS-IS/MPLS/Segment Routing, IP backbone architectures, service-provider routing platforms (Juniper, Nokia).
- Experience with Python or other programming languages (REST APIs, NETCONF/YANG, gNMI, OpenConfig, network automation frameworks, telemetry and time-series monitoring, Git workflows).
Skills
Required:Ciena platformsNokia platformsDark-fiber networksDWDM & coherent transmission
Nice to have:Multi-vendor environments
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% paid by CoreWeave)
- Company-paid life insurance
- Voluntary supplemental life insurance
- Short and long-term disability
- Flexible Spending Account
- Health Savings Account
- Tuition Reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
- Mental Wellness benefits
- Family-forming support
- Paid parental leave
- Childcare support (Kinside)
- 401(k) with generous employer match
- Flexible PTO
- Catered lunch daily in office/data centers
- Casual work environment
- Innovative disruption-focused culture
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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