Technical Proxy Product Owner (PPO) - Cloud & Hybrid Connectivity - N

About Proximus NXT

Proximus NXT Luxembourg supports all organizations in their digital transformation, by providing holistic ICT & Telecommunication solutions, as well as tailored managed services. With our partners and customers, we co-create opportunities and enable growth in a secure and sustainable manner. As a result of our unique expertise in next-gen IT services, mobile and advanced connectivity, we help our customers achieve their ambitions and realize their vision.

Together with them and our partners we implement sovereign and trusted solutions that make people work smarter.-

Your mission : Role Purpose

The Technical Proxy Product Owner - Cloud & Hybrid Connectivity acts as the technical and product interface between the Customer Product Owner, Cloud Architects, engineering teams and dependent infrastructure squads.

The Cloud product currently provides and operates AWS infrastructure and will progressively extend its scope to Microsoft Azure. It is also responsible for cloud and hybrid connectivity, including interconnection services provided through partners such as Equinix.

This is not a purely functional Product Owner position.

The PPO must possess sufficient technical depth to:

• understand the architecture proposed by Cloud and Network Architects;
• challenge technical choices and assumptions;
• identify dependencies, risks and operational impacts;
• understand alternatives and associated trade-offs;
• translate customer requirements into technically meaningful backlog items;
• verify that proposed solutions meet business, security, resiliency, automation and operational requirements.

The PPO does not replace the Technical Architect but must be capable of having a peer-level technical discussion with the Architect and of challenging a proposal when necessary.

Key Responsibilities

1. Product Ownership and Customer Interface

Act as the primary interface between the Customer Product Owner and the Cloud squad.

Responsibilities include:

• understand customer business and infrastructure requirements;
• translate requirements into product capabilities, epics, features and actionable backlog items;
• establish clear acceptance criteria;
• clarify requirements before engineering work starts;
• prioritize the backlog together with the Customer Product Owner;
• identify technical prerequisites and external dependencies;
• ensure that architecture and engineering activities remain aligned with product priorities;
• communicate technical constraints, risks and alternatives in language understandable by the Product Owner;
• provide transparency regarding delivery status, risks, dependencies and technical debt.

The PPO is expected to actively participate in discussions rather than simply forward information between the Product Owner and engineering teams.

2. Architecture Challenge and Technical Governance

The PPO must be capable of reviewing and challenging proposed cloud and connectivity architectures.

For every significant solution, the PPO should be able to ask and understand questions such as:

• Why has this architecture been selected?
• What alternatives were considered?
• What are the failure scenarios?
• Is there any single point of failure?
• How does traffic flow during normal operation and during failure?
• What happens if a BGP session or interconnection fails?
• Could the proposed routing policy create a route leak or asymmetric routing?
• How is network segmentation implemented?
• How is connectivity controlled between cloud, datacentre and external networks?
• What are the security boundaries?
• How will the solution scale?
• How will it be monitored and troubleshot?
• Can the infrastructure be rebuilt automatically?
• Is the configuration represented in Infrastructure as Code?
• Is the configuration consistent with NetBox?
• What is the rollback strategy?
• What operational teams will be impacted?
• What is the cost impact of the proposed design?

The PPO must be able to distinguish between a technically functional solution and a production-ready, secure, resilient and maintainable service.

3. Cloud Infrastructure

Strong knowledge of AWS infrastructure is required.

The candidate should understand, at minimum:

• AWS Organizations and multi-account architectures;
• VPC design;
• subnets and routing tables;
• Transit Gateway;
• Direct Connect;
• VPN connectivity;
• PrivateLink and VPC endpoints;
• Route 53 and DNS integration;
• Internet Gateway and NAT Gateway;
• Security Groups and Network ACLs;
• IAM concepts and cross-account access;
• availability zones and regional architectures;
• high availability and disaster recovery principles;
• cloud monitoring and logging;
• infrastructure automation;
• cloud cost drivers and basic FinOps principles.

The candidate must understand how AWS infrastructure integrates with traditional enterprise networking.

Knowledge of Microsoft Azure must either already exist or be developed as the product extends towards Azure.

Relevant Azure technologies include:

• Virtual Networks;
• VNet peering;
• Azure Virtual WAN;
• ExpressRoute;
• VPN Gateway;
• Azure Route Server;
• User Defined Routes;
• Private Link;
• Azure Firewall;
• Network Security Groups;
• Azure DNS;
• hybrid connectivity.

4. Networking and Hybrid Connectivity

Strong networking knowledge is mandatory.

The PPO must understand:

Routing

• IPv4 and preferably IPv6;
• subnetting and IP addressing;
• routing tables;
• static and dynamic routing;
• BGP;
• Autonomous Systems;
• eBGP and iBGP;
• BGP attributes;
• Local Preference;
• MED;
• AS Path;
• BGP communities;
• route filtering;
• prefix advertisements;
• route summarization;
• route redistribution;
• ECMP;
• routing convergence;
• route propagation;
• asymmetric routing;
• default route management.

The candidate must be sufficiently comfortable with BGP to discuss routing policies with network architects and understand the potential impact of their decisions.

Connectivity

Understanding of:

• Internet connectivity;
• private cloud interconnection;
• MPLS/WAN concepts;
• IPsec VPN;
• redundant connectivity;
• Layer 2 versus Layer 3 interconnection;
• bandwidth and latency;
• MTU issues;
• DNS;
• load balancing;
• firewalls and network segmentation.

Cloud Interconnection

Knowledge of cloud interconnection models including technologies and services such as:

• AWS Direct Connect;
• Azure ExpressRoute;
• Equinix Fabric;
• cloud exchange/interconnection services;
• colocation environments;
• redundant physical and logical connectivity;
• BGP-based cloud connectivity.

The PPO should be able to understand the complete traffic path:

Application Cloud Network Cloud Edge Interconnection Provider Backbone/Data Centre Firewall Destination

and identify which team owns each component.

5. Infrastructure as Code and Automation

The Cloud product follows an Infrastructure as Code and automation-first approach.

The PPO is not expected to be the team's main developer but must understand the technologies sufficiently to review implementation approaches and challenge manual processes.

Required knowledge includes:

Git / GitLab

• Git fundamentals;
• branches;
• Merge Requests;
• code review;
• protected branches;
• tagging and releases;
• CI/CD pipelines;
• pipeline stages;
• automated testing;
• deployment approvals;
• rollback strategies;
• secrets and CI/CD variables.

The PPO should be comfortable opening a GitLab repository, understanding its structure, reviewing a Merge Request and following a CI/CD pipeline.

Terraform

Understanding of:

• providers;
• resources;
• modules;
• variables;
• state;
• remote state;
• plans;
• dependencies;
• lifecycle;
• drift;
• reusable modules;
• environment separation.

The PPO should be capable of reading a Terraform plan and understanding the infrastructure changes that will result from its execution.

Ansible

Understanding of:

• inventories;
• playbooks;
• roles;
• variables;
• idempotency;
• automation workflows;
• integration with CI/CD.

NetBox

NetBox is used as a Source of Truth.

The PPO must understand:

• IP Address Management;
• prefixes;
• VLANs;
• devices;
• interfaces;
• sites;
• tenants;
• relationships between inventory data and automation;
• API-driven integrations;
• the principle that automation should consume authoritative data rather than duplicate it manually.
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