• Manager Security, Cryptography & Protocol Engineering

Manager Network Security, Cryptography & Protocol Engineering

5-9 years experience • • 25% travel

About the role.

We are looking for a Manager who lives at the intersection of network protocols and applied cryptography. This is a deeply hands-on role you will spend most of your time in the lab and in the code: reading RFCs, extending open-source stacks, wiring up IPsec, MACsec, WireGuard, TLS 1.3 and PQC overlays, and hardening the security of everything you touch. Not an architect-review role; a build, break, benchmark and ship role with real ownership of what runs in production.

The role sits within Strategy & Innovations at Tata Communications and reports into the Network Architecture leadership.

Key responsibilities

- Own security and cryptography depth develop and demonstrate a first-principles understanding of the primitives (symmetric

ciphers, hashes, KEMs, signatures, PQC) and of the protocols that use them (TLS 1.3, IPsec, MACsec, WireGuard, QKD key delivery). Know when to apply which primitive, and why.
- Experiment with security protocols hands-on build, break, benchmark and tune IPsec (IKEv2, ESP), MACsec (802.1AE),

WireGuard, TLS variants and PQC overlays in the lab; capture what works, what breaks, and what to change; publish findings back to the team.
- Implement and extend network protocols read IETF / IEEE RFCs end-to-end and turn them into production-quality code in

C, C++, Rust or Python. Add features and capabilities to existing protocol implementations (routing daemons, tunnelling stacks, control planes, overlays).
- Improve the software stack profile, patch and harden open-source or in-house network / security stacks (strongSwan,

wpa_supplicant, kernel netfilter, libsodium, liboqs, and equivalents). Own the quality bar for the code you ship; contribute upstream where it makes sense.
- Design security into the code, not around it — apply mutual authentication, key rotation, forward secrecy, replay protection and

side-channel awareness at the protocol layer. Ensure every feature ships with a defensible security model,



not a checklist.
- Ship code fast with AI-assisted development — use prompt engineering, LLM-based coding assistants and code-review agents

fluently, so features go from RFC to running code in days rather than weeks — without compromising correctness or test coverage.
- Own delivery end-to-end — take features from RFC to running code on schedule; carry code reviews, testing and CI/CD hygiene as first-class personal responsibilities.
- Required qualifications
- Education — Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electronics, Telecommunications, Information Technology or a closely related engineering discipline.
- Experience — 4–6 years of hands-on, post-degree experience in both network protocol engineering and applied network security / cryptography (not one or the other). Real code ownership on at least two production or open-source protocol / crypto stacks.
- Networking protocol depth — solid working understanding of L2/L3 machinery (Ethernet, VLAN, VXLAN, IP/IPv6, TCP, QUIC, BGP, OSPF), tunnelling (GRE, IPsec, WireGuard), and how overlays compose over underlays. Comfortable reading packet captures and reasoning about wire format.
- Security and cryptography depth — practical fluency with TLS 1.3, IPsec (IKEv2, ESP), MACsec (802.1AE), WireGuard;

symmetric ciphers (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305), hashes (SHA-2/3, BLAKE), KEMs and signatures (ECDH, ECDSA, Ed25519, ML-KEM, ML-DSA); hands-on with OpenSSL, libsodium, liboqs and equivalent crypto libraries; key-management basics (HSM, KMS,

PKCS#11).

- Programming proficiency — production-quality code in at least one of C, C++, Rust or Python; comfortable with systems-level

code, build systems (make, cargo, cmake), version control (git),



unit / integration testing, and CI pipelines.
- RFC literacy — able to read an IETF or IEEE specification end-to-end, identify exactly what needs to be built or changed, and

translate it into working code and test cases.
- Cloud networking — at least one of AWS, Azure or GCP at working depth: VPC/VNet design, transit gateway, private link, cloud

firewalls, cloud-to-on-prem interconnect.
- Delivery discipline — proven track record of shipping design and code projects on schedule; comfortable with structured design

reviews, change management, and post-implementation review. Preferred (nice-to-have) qualifications

Certifications: CCNP Enterprise / Security or CCIE (Cisco); Fortinet NSE 4–7; Palo Alto PCNSE; AWS Advanced Networking or

Security Specialty; CISSP or CCSP; ITIL Foundation; PMP.

Emerging technology exposure: Post-quantum cryptography (ML-KEM, ML-DSA), quantum-safe key delivery; SASE architectures;

container/Kubernetes networking (CNI, service mesh); observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK); automation (Ansible, Terraform,

Python).

Regulated-industry experience: Banking, telecom, healthcare or government network design carrying real compliance obligations.

- Excellent communicator — clear written English (design docs, proposals, customer decks) and confident spoken English (workshops,

executive updates); ability to translate deep technical detail into business impact.
- Ownership and on-time delivery — takes personal responsibility for outcomes; a demonstrated passion for closing work on schedule

without compromising quality.
- Self-driven learner & AI-native builder — plans and executes own upskilling; keeps pace with a fast-moving technology landscape;

fluent in prompt engineering and LLM-based coding assistants to ship features faster and with fewer defects than traditional workflows would allow.
- Structured, team-oriented, customer-centric — decomposes ambiguous problems and defends choices with data; works well across

pre-sales, engineering, operations and customer teams.

📌 Manager (Bengaluru)
🏢 Tata Communications
📍 Bengaluru