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, Microsoft Teams Rooms, Crestron, and Zoom Rooms.

· Cloud Voice Integration: Design and support integrations between on-premises voice infrastructure and cloud collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams Phone, Direct Routing, Operator Connect, Webex Calling, and comparable services.

· Engineering Escalation: Serve as the senior engineering escalation point for complex voice and video incidents involving call routing, signaling, media negotiation, interoperability, packet loss, jitter, latency, one-way audio, call quality, or service availability.

· Root-Cause Analysis: Lead technical investigations, identify underlying causes, develop permanent corrective actions, and ensure lessons learned are incorporated into standards, designs, and operating procedures.

· QoS and Transport Optimization: Collaborate with Transport and Network Engineering to design and validate end-to-end QoS, including traffic classification and marking using DSCP and Layer 2 CoS, queuing, shaping, policing, call admission control, bandwidth planning, and class-of-service mapping across LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, and carrier transport services.

· Monitoring and Service Assurance: Support the implementation and use of monitoring, alerting, call-quality analytics, call-detail records, capacity reporting, and trend analysis for enterprise voice and video services.

Required Experience and Education

· Professional Experience: Ten or more years of progressive engineering experience in VoIP, VTC, enterprise telephony, unified communications, or a closely related technical discipline.

· Leadership Experience: At least three years of technical leadership experience, including formal supervisory or people-management responsibilities such as staffing, performance management, employee development, and workload assignment.

· Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Telecommunications, Electrical Engineering, or a related field. Equivalent relevant education, certifications, and practical experience may be considered.

Preferred Technical Proficiencies

· VoIP and Telephony Protocols: Advanced knowledge of SIP, SDP, RTP/RTCP, SRTP, H.323, MGCP, ISDN/PRI, and related voice and video signaling and media protocols.

· Call-Control Platforms: Proven experience with enterprise platforms such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unity Connection, Microsoft Teams Phone, or comparable on-premises and cloud-based call-control systems.

· Dial Plans and Carrier Services: Experience with enterprise dial-plan architecture, E.164 numbering, digit manipulation, SIP trunks, PSTN connectivity, carrier interconnections, voice gateways, and emergency calling.

· VTC and Collaboration Systems: Extensive experience designing, integrating, and deploying enterprise video collaboration systems, including Cisco, Poly, Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, Crestron, or comparable platforms.

· Session Border Controllers: Advanced experience configuring and troubleshooting enterprise SBCs such as AudioCodes Mediant, Ribbon SBC, Oracle Communications Session Border Controller/Acme Packet, and Cisco CUBE.

· Cloud and Hybrid Voice: Experience integrating on-premises telephony with cloud collaboration services, including Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and Operator Connect, Webex Calling, or comparable platforms.

· Network and QoS Analysis: Strong knowledge of IP networking, routing, switching, VLANs, firewalls, Network Address Translation, SIP and media traversal, packet-capture analysis, QoS policy design, and bandwidth and capacity planning.

· Security and Identity: Working knowledge of SIP TLS, mutual TLS, SRTP, certificates and PKI, directory services, identity integration, secure configuration baselines, vulnerability remediation, and change and configuration management.

· Troubleshooting Tools: Demonstrated ability to use Wireshark, platform traces, SBC logs, call-detail records, monitoring systems, and other diagnostic tools to isolate complex signaling, media, network, and interoperability problems.

Leadership and Communication Skills

· Ability to balance people leadership, engineering delivery, technical governance, and hands-on technical contribution.

· Strong judgment and decision-making skills, including the ability to prioritize competing requirements and manage technical and delivery risks.

· Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts, risks, and recommendations to engineers, customers, program leaders, and executive stakeholders.

· Strong customer and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to establish expectations, communicate constraints, and resolve technical or organizational issues.

· Proven problem-solving ability and experience leading teams through complex, high-pressure operational or engineering situations.

· Commitment to employee development, knowledge sharing, process improvement, and engineering excellence.

Preferred Certifications and Qualifications

· Cisco Certified Network Professional Collaboration or Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert Collaboration.

· Current Microsoft certification related to collaboration communications systems, Microsoft Teams Phone, or an equivalent voice and collaboration technology.

· Current AudioCodes, Ribbon, Cisco, Microsoft, or comparable voice and collaboration certification.

· Experience developing technical proposals, statements of work, bills of material, level-of-effort estimates, staffing plans, or technical risk assessments.

· Experience with automation and scripting for telephony administration and provisioning using Python, PowerShell, REST APIs, or comparable technologies.

Experience supporting large-scale, geographically distributed, highly available, or mission-critical voice and video environments.

NGEN

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Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.