Technical Manager

We are looking for a Technical Manager with strong engineering depth who leads from the front. You will be the technical and business champion for the products in your portfolio: knowing each one end to end, upholding and raising the standards for how they are built, deployed, and run, and levelling up the engineering and deployment teams around them. Engineering depth is a primary requirement, on equal footing with pre-sales, solution architecture, and deployment oversight. You must be able to architect, design, and review both designs and code, and personally drive the most critical or complex deliveries.

This is not a daily heads-down coding role, but you must be hands-on enough to set the technical bar and step into the code when it matters. You will own the technical solution end to end: supporting the technical-sales team in pre-sales, architecting for greenfield and brownfield operator environments, designing the integration with core network nodes, making it production-ready, and stepping in on the hardest faults when nothing obvious is wrong. You guide the deployment leads and managers who run the rollout, rather than running it yourself. You lead the technical conversations with operator clients, review your team's work, track technical delivery, mentor engineers, and keep stakeholders aligned. This is also an AI-first role. As the team's AI lead, you will drive AI through every phase, from pre-sales and proposals to design, code, testing, deployment, and live operations, always with a human in the loop. AI is the default accelerator; engineers validate every output before it touches a live operator network. You set the standards, the guardrails, and the example.

Responsibilities:

• Pre-Sales and Solution Design: Pre-sales engagement: partner with the technical-sales team on operator calls as the deep technical expert; own the technical narrative and feasibility assessments, and lead the technical thread when needed. RFP ownership: drive RFP/RFI responses end-to-end (solution write-ups, compliance matrices, architecture diagrams, and effort and dependency inputs).
• Solution architecture and design direction: Own the solution architecture for greenfield and brownfield operator environments (existing nodes, legacy integrations, live-traffic constraints) and the HLD; engage deeply on LLD breakdown and impact analysis for complex or high-risk changes, rather than every routine one. Change governance: provide direction on change requests, engaging closely on the complex or high-impact ones: confirming it is the right thing to build, and the most efficient way to build it.
• Development and Engineering Technical depth and ownership: be the technical authority for the team: review designs and code, and personally drive the critical, complex, or high-risk deliveries. You are not expected to code daily, but you must be strong enough in the stack to step in, set the technical bar, and unblock the team on the hardest problems. Product ownership: own the technical roadmap and technical delivery of your products, from design through implementation, testing, and production-ready releases.
• Performance and reliability: drive performance and reliability as a continuous discipline: review, advise, and steer the team to keep optimising for high-throughput, low-latency, carrier-grade workloads (concurrency, memory efficiency, failover), not as a one-time exercise.
• Interfaces and APIs: lead the design of protocol- and system-level interfaces (SIP/RTP, SMPP, Diameter and SCAP v2 (Service Charging Application Protocol v2 a Diameter-based charging interface), REST/HTTP APIs, message queues, and AI/LLM tooling), and steer the team's research, design, and technical integration with deep domain expertise. Engineering standards: own and uphold coding standards, Git branching, CI/CD practices, and review discipline, including sign-off on critical releases; mentor engineers through hands-on pairing and reviews.
• Core Network and Platform Integration: Core integrations: support and guide the deployment team on integrations with operator core network nodes and protocols: SIP, RTP/SRTP, SMPP, IN/SCP, OCS, HLR, and SMTP. SDP and billing: guide the deployment team through SDP integrations and billing-system migrations with zero or minimal service disruption.
• Infrastructure, Operations and Monitoring: OS standards and migrations: own and evolve OS-level requirements across your products (sizing, hardening, kernel and network tuning) in consultation with the infrastructure team, keep them consistent across deployments, and coach the engineering and deployment teams through migrations on live platforms.
• Networking: own networking requirements across your products (segmentation, firewalls and whitelisting, DNS, proxy, routing, latency, hosting, and connectivity to operator elements) in consultation with the infrastructure team, and guide both teams in applying them.
• Database and data layer: carry a strong working understanding of the database and data layer (schema, query performance, replication, data integrity, and reporting) so you can architect sound solutions, debug issues that span application and database, uphold data-layer practices, and coach both teams. You guide the data design and resolve the hard problems; you do not own day-to-day DBA operations.
• Monitoring: own monitoring and alerting standards across your products and ensure both teams apply them, so issues are caught before customers notice, and continuously raise the bar in line with current industry best practices.
• Operational Support and Complex Debugging: L3 oversight and coaching: oversee resolution of the hardest (L3) issues. The team owns day-to-day L1-L2 support and resolution, while you provide direction and coaching on complex escalations, with clear discipline and timely closure. Deep debugging: guide the team through complex, non-trivial production issues across the application, OS, and network layers, stepping in personally on the toughest faults, using AI-assisted analysis to isolate root cause and resolve faster. Critical technical calls: step in on critical client-facing technical calls to support and guide the operations team (root-cause explanations and corrective-action direction) when senior technical input is needed.
• AI-Led Delivery Human in the Loop AI across the SDLC: apply AI across the full software development lifecycle (requirements, design, code, code review, test generation, deployment planning, and documentation) with a named human reviewer validating every output before it ships.
• AI in pre-sales and docs: use AI to accelerate pre-sales and documentation (RFP responses, solution write-ups, impact analyses, and architecture artefacts), first-drafted with AI and refined by the team.
• AI in deployment and operations: make AI-assisted early detection, triage, and remediation standard practice across deployment and live operations, so the team prevents and resolves issues faster. Human-in-the-loop governance: own and evolve the guardrails: review gates, quality bars, data handling rules, and clear boundaries on what AI may and may not touch in live operator systems.
• AI enablement and innovation: coach the team into AI-native ways of working; continuously evaluate new AI tools, coding agents, and agentic workflows, adopt what works, and measure the gains.
• Delivery and Team Leadership: Delivery tracking: track tasks and delivery milestones across your products; keep execution visible and predictable. Stakeholder management: run stakeholder sync-ups and updates across engineering, product, and client organisations.
• Hiring and team building: hire, onboard, and grow a high-performing engineering team, and shape its structure as the portfolio scales. Performance management: set clear objectives, run performance reviews, give continuous feedback, and address underperformance fairly and promptly.
• Coaching and growth: mentor engineers, build technical depth across the team, and create clear growth and career paths.
• Motivation and retention: keep the team engaged and motivated, and retain key talent in a competitive market. Conflict resolution: resolve conflicts constructively and keep the team aligned, collaborative, and focused on outcomes.

Requirements:

• Strong telecom domain knowledge is essential: deep, working understanding of mobile operator networks, VAS, charging/billing, and signalling flows, with the credibility to lead technical conversations with operator clients.
• Minimum 10 years in telecom VAS (with adjacent core-network platform experience welcome), including at least 5 years of hands-on development and 3+ years setting technical direction, designing and reviewing with the team, and coaching engineers.
• Strong, current programming ability in one or more systems or back-end languages (e. g., C/C++, Java, or Python) and scripting languages, with a solid command of data structures, algorithms, concurrency and multithreading, inter-process communication, sockets, and memory management, the fundamentals of high-performance, carrier-grade software.
• Working familiarity across the application stack: back-end frameworks (e. g., Spring Boot, Node.js ), front-end frameworks (e. g., React or Angular), containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), messaging/streaming (e. g., Kafka), and caching (e. g., Redis), enough to review and guide full-stack delivery.
• Solid testing and quality-engineering practices: unit and integration testing, test automation, and load/performance testing for high-throughput systems.
• Hands-on command of telecom protocols and nodes: SIP, RTP/SRTP, SMPP, IN/SCP, OCS, HLR, USSD, and SMTP; practical understanding of charging and messaging flows.
• Proven solution-architecture experience across greenfield and brownfield operator deployments, including HLD/LLD authorship, impact analysis, and design for scalability, high availability, redundancy, and failover.
• Strong Linux skills for development and debugging: performance tuning and production troubleshooting using standard profiling, tracing, and log/system diagnostic tools.
• Solid networking fundamentals: routing, proxies, DNS, firewalls, latency analysis, and hosting/topology trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with modern observability and alerting stacks (e. g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, the ELK stack, or Datadog).
• Database depth with a relational engine (e. g., Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL): schema design, SQL / stored-procedure development, query and report optimisation, and data integrity in high-volume systems.
• Security-conscious engineering: secure coding and authentication/authorization (e. g., OAuth2/JWT); disciplined use of vetted, well-maintained libraries and third-party components; keeping dependencies and OS versions patched and current; and ensuring product compliance with operator and regulatory security standards.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex production faults across application, OS, and network layers.
• Hands-on mastery of AI engineering tools (coding agents/assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot) with demonstrable delivery impact, and the ability to design human-in-the-loop workflows where AI output is always reviewed before release.
• Experience leading client-facing technical engagements with telecom operators.
• Proven ability to own multiple products or deployments in parallel, prioritising across them without losing technical depth.
• People-management experience: leading, hiring, growing, and retaining engineering teams.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering (BE / B. Tech / ME / M. Tech / MCA).

Nice to have:

• Depth in applied AI engineering: prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LLM evaluation, and building internal AI tooling and integrations (e. g., MCP, automation pipelines).
• Hands-on experience with Agentic AI platforms and Conversational AI (voice/chat) products.
• Exposure to multi-country operator deployments and direct technical engagement with customers across Africa, MENA, or South Asia.
• Technical pre-sales or solutions-consulting experience with operator clients.

Skills

C++, Diameter, HLR, Java, Python, SIP, SMPP, USSD, VAS, billing, charging, signaling, telecom