Your employer
Our customer is leading provider of open and fully interoperable IP, Optical & Software solutions to service providers around the world
In order to keep up with the growing customer base, and increase the Services turnover, our customer is looking for a new Vice President, Customer & R&D Operations
Your responsibilities
The VP, Customer and R&D Operations, leads all teams providing operational support either internally (R&D) or externally (Customer Delivery & Support). This role reports to the Group CTO and VP R&D. It has full accountability for delivering top-of-the-class professional services to customers worldwide, as well as supporting all R&D activities from a Project Management perspective but also in terms of System Testing and other transversal activities, such as Technical Writing and interfacing with Manufacturing.
He/she shall be in charge of the following activities:
- Leads an international team of ca. 60 staff members, distributed in 10 different countries (with most resources in France and Belgium)
- Hires, motivates, trains, develops and coaches assigned personnel in accordance with HR Group policies and corporate strategic objectives
- Ensures Service Level Agreement commitments are met by driving an efficient Customer Support activity and by working closely with R&D teams
- Strengthens our professional services delivery capabilities by e.g. identifying partners to be able to scale up in some areas
- Enhances our service portfolio value proposition in close collaboration with sales, pre-sales and product line management
- Develops synergies between Customer Support teams (Access and Transport) as well with Field Technical Experts to better support our customers and increase technical expertize
- Plays a key role in moving to a full agile R&D organization
- Partners with R&D teams to keep improving the quality of our products and solutions, in particular by ensuring R&D testing is fully representative of field deployments, and by increasing the percentage of software issues found in R&D vs. those found in customer networks
- Plays a key role in strengthening our system testing capabilities, through further automation, leveraging state-of-the-art test frameworks and infrastructure and permanently benchmarking ourselves with best-in-class players
- Defines and monitors budget execution
- Ensures that quality processes (ISO9001-ISO14001-CMMi) are respected and applied inside the applicable departments
- Represents our customer Support activities in front of customers and is able to take the lead for crisis management whenever necessary
- Promotes our customer solutions and leads a small team of highly skilled experts to support Proofs of Concept in customer environments, and initial integration activities for our NFV and SD-WAN solutions
- Adopts an open and fair management style in combination with an intense two-way communication with all employees in order to obtain a motivated and well-informed workforce
- Maintains good relationships with Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Pre-Sales, Quality, Manufacturing and R&D departments in order to better support our customers and improves global quality
Your profile
- MSc or MEng degree in Telecommunications, Computer Science or Electronics
- Good technical background in IP and Optical Transport domains
- Ideally good knowledge of virtualization, cloud, SD-WAN / SASE technologies
- Extensive experience in managing operational customer service teams, ideally in a large vendor and/or a large service provider
- Strong project management skills, with a good understanding of agile methodology, and ideally a prior experience in leading agile organizations
- Strong strategic and customer focus with a clear understanding of our customer markets and ability to interact with customers at senior level
- Ideally some previous experience in integrating personnel coming from acquisitions
- At least 5 years’ experience in a technical support organization and/or a commercial support organization, preference for an international Telecom vendor
- At least 10 years’ experience in a managerial position
- Fluent in English and French
