Interim Director, Network Automation GCC — Service Recovery

The mandate

An automated configuration release caused widespread service degradation, prompting global operations to freeze further ownership transfer to the India centre. The local director resigned after the incident review, leaving the site with strong engineers but no credible release and run authority.

The interim must begin within two weeks for a fixed ten-month assignment. Permanent recruitment begins once the repaired automation platform completes two safe releases, with five weeks reserved for transfer before expiry.

Handover is complete when the incident causes are closed, automation changes meet simulation and canary gates, India operates the platform through ninety stable days, frozen transfers resume under accepted criteria, and the successor approves one high-impact network change.

The interim may stop automation, change release controls, reassign engineers and spend ₹8 crore inside the recovery budget. New network domains, permanent leadership hires, platform replacement, production risk acceptance rated high and supplier spend above ₹12 crore require global CIO approval.

Radio planning, physical network maintenance and commercial service design are outside scope. The centre owns the automation products and operational response it is explicitly assigned, not the underlying network policy.

Why this seat is open

The incident collapsed trust in local release authority just as the site was taking wider ownership. Existing managers authored parts of the failed pipeline and cannot independently certify its repair. An interim director can restore evidence and finish a bounded transfer before permanent appointment.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the failure across intent, inventory, code, simulation, approval, rollout, monitoring and rollback.
• Decide which automations remain disabled until blast-radius and recovery controls are independently tested.
• Set release gates for digital-twin simulation, configuration diff, canary scope, telemetry and automatic rollback.
• Establish India on-call ownership with runbooks, decision authority and global escalation for live network impact.
• Deliver two safe releases and ninety days of stable platform operation.
• Restart frozen domain transfers only after build, test, run and incident responsibilities are demonstrated.
• Transfer platform risks, release evidence, domain charters, supplier actions and leadership assessments to the permanent director.

Candidate qualifications

• Led telecom network automation, OSS engineering or network-platform SRE at director level.
• Recovered a configuration-automation incident with material live-network impact.
• Implemented simulation, canary and rollback controls for high-blast-radius change.
• Built India teams with both engineering and twenty-four-hour operational ownership.
• Managed global network stakeholders who withdrew delivery authority after failure.
• Understands network inventory, configuration intent, assurance telemetry and service consequence.

Non-negotiables

• Available in Hyderabad within fourteen days.
• No current role with the automation platform or assurance-tool suppliers.
• Will not resume high-impact automation without exercised rollback.
• Must have owned production network-change authority.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm availability and disclose any telecom supplier conflict.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a network automation failure you contained and the rollback trigger used.
3. 49 words maximum. Which simulation result would block even a small canary release?