Lead Deployment Engineer 5G/6G/NTN

Job Title: Lead Deployment Engineer 5G/6G/NTN

Work Location: Austin, TX Cupertino, CA & San Diego, CA

Employment Type: Fulltime/Permanent

Independent Candidates Only

Year of Experience: 10+ years

Key Responsibilities:

The Senior Forward Deployment Engineer works inside a customer's development program as software developer, systems engineer, and deployment lead in one role, and ships production code. This person determines and develops approaches to complex assignments, leads major deployment engagements using in-depth experience to influence outcomes, diagnoses problems deep within the protocol stack (Layer 1 to Layer 3), modifies software, validates fixes, and delivers controlled releases during a customer's early development, integration, and regression cycles. This is a customer-facing software engineering role where you will embed directly within a customer environment to customize, integrate, and deploy technology into real-world production systems, leading complex, high-impact problems.

Core Responsibilities:

Lead major or large-scale deployment engagements, coordinating across Key sight and customer engineering teams

Own technically complex deployment issues from first report to validated fix, and serve as the go-to technical resource for deployment issues within the account or program

Work onsite or closely with wireless customer development teams during major feature introductions

Analyze signaling flows, traces, timing behavior, and performance data to isolate failures across Key sight and customer implementations

Write and modify application and protocol-stack software, plus the supporting software and firmware the customer environment requires

Develop and extend Python APIs that customer teams integrate against

Build automation workflows inside the customer's workflows

Create diagnostic instrumentation when existing tools are insufficient

Develop, validate, and deploy controlled patches, feature flags, and interim releases under Keysight's release process

Run rapid prototyping loops directly with customers to test and iterate on new features based on live feedback

Act as a feedback loop to the core product and engineering teams, translating field problems into engineering requirements and defects for product management and R&D Qualifications Typically requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree (or equivalent) and 6-7 years of relevant software/systems engineering experience.

Strong software-development experience across multiple software stacks

Preferred expertise in at least one domain (PHY/L1, MAC/RLC/PDCP and L2, or RRC/NAS and L3), plus working knowledge of adjacent layers and end-to-end 4G, 5G, and 5G-Advanced system behavior

Proficiency in C/C++ and Python (including API development), Linux, embedded or real-time software, and automated testing

Experience debugging protocol interactions through logs, traces, packet captures, call flows, and timing analysis

Familiarity with 3GPP specifications and the practical differences among standards compliance, interoperability, and implementation behavior

Experience in design and test instrumentation and test emulation tools

Ability to produce production-quality code that ships in a customer's build

The judgment and customer presence to operate inside confidential development programs

Excellent communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders

Willingness to relocate or travel to a specific customer site as required by the assignment

Extensive experience and breadth and depth of knowledge across multiple protocol layers and software stacks, with demonstrated ability to work independently

Demonstrated ability to lead technical discussions with customer Travel Requirement: Up to 50% travel to local client sites. Occasional international travel may also be required.

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