NEN Solution Engineering – Voice Team Lead

We are seeking a seasoned, hands-on VoIP/VTC Solution Engineering Manager to lead our Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) Solution Engineering team. Reporting directly to the Director of Digital Engineering, this position is primarily accountable for people leadership, engineering quality, resource planning, and the successful delivery of the team's technical commitments. This is a people-management role with significant hands-on technical leadership responsibilities. The manager will supervise, mentor, and develop a team of approximately four Solution Engineers while remaining actively engaged in solution architecture, design reviews, complex implementations, and Tier 3/Tier 4 engineering escalations. As a Level T5 leader, the manager will serve as the domain technical authority for assigned enterprise voice, video teleconferencing (VTC), telephony, and collaboration solutions. The position will partner closely with Transport Engineering, Network Operations, Cybersecurity, program leadership, customers, and vendor partners to establish engineering standards, modernize legacy telephony environments, and architect secure, resilient, and supportable on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based collaboration solutions. Key Responsibilities 1.     People and Team Leadership ·       Team Management:  Directly supervise, coach, and manage a team of approximately four VoIP, VTC, and Telephony Solution Engineers. ·       Performance and Career Development:  Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, establish measurable performance objectives, complete annual performance reviews, identify training needs, and guide employee career development. ·       Workload and Capacity Planning:  Prioritize projects and engineering tasks, balance workloads across team members, assign technical leads, and ensure the timely delivery of engineering commitments. ·       Staffing and Succession Planning:  Forecast staffing requirements, identify technical skill gaps, develop succession and cross-training plans, and maintain appropriate engineering coverage. ·       Recruitment and Onboarding:  Lead technical interviews, candidate evaluations, hiring recommendations, and onboarding activities. ·       Team Culture:  Foster a high-performing, collaborative, accountable, and inclusive engineering culture that encourages technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement. 2.     Engineering Delivery and Governance ·       Delivery Management:  Own the engineering quality, technical execution, schedules, priorities, risks, dependencies, and stakeholder expectations associated with the team's assigned work. ·       Engineering Lifecycle:  Ensure solutions progress through documented requirements, alternatives analysis, architecture, detailed design, design review, laboratory validation, implementation planning, acceptance testing, configuration control, and transition to operations. ·       Engineering Documentation:  Ensure the development and maintenance of high-level and low-level designs, bills of material, test plans, implementation procedures, rollback plans, configuration baselines, and as-built documentation. ·       Operational Readiness:  Confirm that new or modified solutions are secure, supportable, monitored, documented, resilient, and ready for operational ownership before deployment or transition. ·       Standards and Compliance:  Establish and enforce engineering design standards, approved product and configuration baselines, Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, cybersecurity controls, and disaster recovery and business continuity requirements. ·       Performance Reporting:  Establish and communicate meaningful measures for engineering backlog, milestone delivery, design quality, lifecycle risk, operational readiness, and recurring technical issues. 3.     Technical Leadership and Architecture ·       Solution Architecture:  Serve as the Subject Matter Expert and architectural authority for assigned enterprise voice, VTC, SIP trunking, Session Border Controller (SBC), telephony, and collaboration solutions. ·       Technical Roadmaps:  Develop and maintain technical roadmaps for modernizing legacy PBX and telephony environments and transitioning to appropriate on-premises, hybrid, UCaaS, and cloud collaboration platforms. ·       Enterprise Telephony Engineering:  Provide technical direction for enterprise dial plans, E.164 number normalization, digit manipulation, call routing, SIP trunking, carrier interconnections, PSTN services, voice gateways, voicemail, and emergency calling capabilities. ·       Availability and Resiliency:  Define technical requirements for high availability, geographic redundancy, survivability, disaster recovery, capacity management, and service continuity. ·       Technology Evaluation:  Lead product evaluations, proof-of-concept activities, interoperability testing, and technical risk assessments for new voice, video, and collaboration technologies. ·       Cross-Functional Alignment:  Coordinate closely with Transport Engineering, Network Operations, Cybersecurity, program leadership, customers, and vendor partners to align collaboration solutions with enterprise infrastructure, security, and operational requirements. ·       Vendor and Carrier Coordination:  Lead technical engagements and escalations involving equipment manufacturers, software providers, telecommunications carriers, SIP service providers, and system integrators. 4.     Hands-On Technical Engineering and Escalation ·       Design and Deployment:  Perform and oversee the configuration, integration, testing, and deployment of IP telephony systems, SIP proxies, SBCs—including AudioCodes, Ribbon, and Cisco CUBE—and unified communications platforms. ·       VTC Engineering:  Architect, integrate, configure, and troubleshoot multi-vendor VTC and audiovisual collaboration environments, including Cisco Room Series and Webex devices, Poly