A telecom infrastructure team in Visakhapatnam is hiring a Lead 5G Network Engineer for its Rushikonda IT SEZ office, full time, in person. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll be the one deciding how a cell site gets tuned when the drive test data disagrees with the simulation, not the person waiting to be told what to do. The employer serves enterprise and consumer connectivity clients across the Andhra Pradesh coast, and the network here has been expanding fast enough that coverage planning has turned into a weekly exercise rather than a quarterly one.
Coverage work doesn't happen behind a desk most days. Expect real hours walking sites, reviewing RF survey data, and adjusting antenna tilt, azimuth, and transmit power against what the drive tests actually show rather than what a planning tool predicted six months ago. A typical week bends around whatever the network is doing right then: a saturated cell during a festival crowd surge, a vendor firmware update that needs validating before it touches production, or a customer escalation that turns out to trace back to a misconfigured handover parameter three sectors away from where anyone first looked.
You would be joining a team of five engineers spread across two shifts, reporting into the regional network operations manager. The lead title here comes with real weight: junior engineers on the team push their configuration changes to you for a second look before anything reaches a live sector, and when a vendor escalation needs a decision at eleven at night, that decision is usually yours to make. It is not a role for someone who wants clear boundaries between planning hours and on-call hours, because 5G rollouts rarely respect either.
What you'll be doing
- Configure and maintain 5G RAN hardware, including gNodeB units, antennas, and transmission equipment across the Visakhapatnam service area
- Lead RF planning and site surveys, adjusting tilt, azimuth, and power settings using live drive-test data
- Troubleshoot connectivity and coverage complaints from field teams and customers, working fault isolation step by step rather than guessing
- Monitor network performance and security around the clock, catching anomalies before they turn into outages
- Plan capacity for the next twelve to eighteen months as subscriber load and new enterprise contracts come online
- Review configuration changes from two to three junior engineers before anything goes live
- Coordinate with equipment vendors on firmware updates, validating each release in a staging sector before it reaches live traffic
On the qualifications side, the company wants a bachelor's degree behind you, in electronics, computer science, or something adjacent, plus a CCNA or CCNP certification and real comfort with routing protocols and infrastructure management that goes deeper than what a certificate alone proves. Nine years of hands-on network engineering experience is the baseline they're looking for, most of it recent, since RAN tooling and vendor firmware both move quickly enough that older experience alone doesn't cover it. A candidate who spent the last three years in a purely planning or design role, away from live troubleshooting, would likely find the transition back into daily fault isolation harder than the years on paper suggest.
Skills that matter here
- 5G network architecture and RAN design principles
- RF planning, including tilt, azimuth, and power budget calculations
- Core networking protocols, including TCP/IP, BGP, and MPLS, and how they interact with the radio access layer
None of the following are dealbreakers if missing, but they help: prior work with Nokia or Ericsson RAN equipment specifically, some network automation scripting in Python, and any exposure to network slicing or private 5G deployments. A candidate strong on the core skills above but light on these extras is still a serious contender, and the team has budget set aside for vendor-specific training in the first quarter for exactly this reason.
The team is small enough that a configuration change you push gets noticed within the hour, for better or worse. That's the trade-off of working at a regional operator instead of a national carrier's sprawling network operations center: less bureaucracy standing between you and a decision, but also less room to quietly walk one back once it's live. Naukri Mitra has carried a handful of telecom postings from this employer over the past year, and this one carries more real technical ownership than most of them; the lead title isn't decorative here.
Interviews run in three stages: a technical screening covering RF fundamentals and troubleshooting scenarios, a site visit where you'll walk through a live sector with the current lead, and a final conversation with the regional operations manager about how you'd handle capacity planning under budget constraints. Most candidates hear back within a week of the final round.
Career growth from here tends to go one of two directions: engineers either move into regional network architecture roles after two or three years of leading a market like this one, or they specialize deeper into RF and end up consulting on rollout planning for new circles entirely. Both paths have precedent on this team, and the current regional manager started in a near-identical lead role four years ago.
Benefits
- Health insurance covering the employee and immediate family
- Paid time off, with additional leave accrued after two years on the job
- Performance-linked annual bonus tied to network uptime and delivery of planned expansion milestones
- Relocation assistance and short-term accommodation support for candidates moving to Visakhapatnam
The role is based at the Rushikonda IT SEZ office, pin code 530045, five days a week on site. Pay runs up to ₹1,54,500 a month depending on certification level and depth of RAN experience. Given the current expansion timeline, the team is hoping to have someone in the chair within four to six weeks of extending an offer, since the rollout schedule for the next coastal sector doesn't leave much slack to wait.
