Sales Engineer, China (Interconnects)

Location:  Beijing, Shenzhen, or Wuhan, China (remote with regular customer/site engagement)

Department:  Global Partnerships / Interconnect Business

Reports To:  VP Business Development & CTO Global Partnerships

You will work hands-on with engineering teams at major cloud providers, leading OEM/ODMs, emerging AI system developers, and silicon ecosystem partners to enable successful design-in of the company's silicon and optical interconnect technologies. This role is crucial to influencing product requirements, driving adoption, accelerating design cycles, and increasing win-rate velocity in one of the world’s most dynamic compute and networking markets.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide pre-sales technical leadership for the company's Interconnects portfolio across hyperscalers, OEM/ODMs, and AI/compute system partners in China, Taiwan, and Asia.

• Lead lab bring-up, debug, interoperability validation, configuration, and performance testing.

• Translate customer system architectures and requirements into technical solutions and roadmap inputs.

• Support quoting decisions, technical documentation, product collateral, compliance materials, and solution configuration.

• Partner with BD and account teams to guide complex design-win cycles from evaluation to production.

• Serve as the primary technical interface for proofs-of-concept (POCs), interoperability events, compliance, and early deployments.

• Deliver technical workshops, product demos, architecture sessions, and executive-level technical briefings.

• Gather competitive intelligence, ecosystem developments, and silicon/optics trends to influence PLM and roadmap alignment.

• Support post-sales issue triage with R&D, sustaining engineering, and quality teams — ensuring customer success during scale-up.

• Advocate for customer requirements while balancing product strategy, roadmap alignment, and commercial constraints.

 Key KPIs

• Number and velocity of design wins

• Lab evaluation cycle time reduction

• Successful POCs and interoperability tests

• Forecast accuracy for ramping programs

• Product feedback captured and actioned into PLM

• Customer technical satisfaction and adoption rate

Required Experience & Skills

• 10 years in sales/solutions engineering, high-speed hardware, optical interconnect, silicon bring-up, or datacenter systems engineering.

• Deep familiarity with one or more of: DSP/retimer, SERDES, optics/pluggables, AEC/ACC, PCIe, Ethernet, high-speed test equipment.

• Experience working directly with Asia-based hyperscalers and cloud builders (e.g., Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance) and/or major OEM/ODMs (e.g., Huawei, ZTE, H3C, Foxconn/Hon Hai, Quanta, Wiwynn, Inventec).

• Hands-on debugging with oscilloscopes, BERTs, IBIS-AMI, simulation, or signal integrity tools.

• Ability to engage simultaneously at engineering depth and executive clarity.

• BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or similar required; MS preferred.

• Fluent Mandarin and professional English (written and spoken); reading proficiency in Traditional Chinese a plus to support Taiwan customers.

• Strong communication, documentation, and presentation skills — able to translate between engineering, PLM, and commercial audiences.

Personal Attributes

• Highly autonomous, accountable, and comfortable in fast-evolving environments.

• Strong customer empathy and ability to navigate technical and organisational ambiguity.

• “Builder” mindset — thrives in high-growth, high-expectation environments.

• Ability to represent Ciena Interconnects with credibility inside next-generation AI and compute ecosystems across China, Taiwan, and Asia.

Travel

Travel up to 40%, including customer labs and interoperability events across China, Taiwan, and the broader Asia region, plus periodic global team sessions.

Pipeline overview:

 

 

 

Note Disclaimer: Please ignore the salary range stated below.