Principal 5G RAN Engineer - Midrand

Introduction

A Principal 5G RAN (Radio Access Network) Engineer is a top-tier technical authority responsible for the architecture, performance, and evolution of the wireless network. Unlike a standard RAN engineer, a "Principal" role focuses on high-level strategy, vendor governance, and solving the most complex systemic issues that ground-level teams cannot.

Duties & Responsibilities

• 5G Roadmap Planning: Defining the transition from Non-Standalone (NSA) to Standalone (SA) architectures and preparing the groundwork for 5G research.
• Network Slicing: Designing end-to-end logical networks (slices) on the same physical infrastructure to support different use cases (e.g., Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency for robotics vs. Massive IoT).
• O-RAN & Disaggregation: Overseeing the shift toward Open RAN standards, ensuring interoperability between different hardware and software vendors (e.g., mixing Samsung, Mavenir, or Nokia components).

2. Advanced Performance & Optimization

• KPI Ownership: Taking ultimate responsibility for high-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like throughput, latency, and drop-call rates across the national or regional network.
• Massive MIMO Strategy: Optimizing advanced antenna technologies and beamforming techniques to maximize spectral efficiency and coverage in dense urban areas.
• Interference Mitigation: Leading the "war room" for complex interference issues that affect 5G spectrum (specifically C-Band or mmWave) which junior engineers are unable to resolve.

3. Vendor Management & Governance

• Technical Evaluation: Leading RFP (Request for Proposal) processes to select equipment vendors. You aren't just looking at the price; you're evaluating their 3GPP compliance and future feature roadmaps.
• Trial & Feature Validation: Overseeing "First Office Applications" (FOAs) where new software releases or hardware features are tested in a live environment before a mass rollout.
• Standards Advocacy: Often representing the company in global standards bodies like 3GPP to influence how future 5G and 6G protocols are written.

4. Leadership & Mentorship

• Technical Escalation: Serving as the final point of escalation for the most critical network outages or performance degradations.
• Upskilling the Workforce: Designing training programs to help junior RF and RAN engineers understand cloud-native networking and virtualization (vRAN/cRAN).
• Cross-Functional Liaison: Working with the Core Network and Transport teams to ensure the "backhaul" can handle the massive data speeds the 5G RAN is generating.

Desired Experience & Qualification

10+ years in RF/Wireless engineering.

Interested?

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