Shaygan Kheradpir, who led Juniper Networks for nine months before being abruptly terminated, is trying this CEO thing again.

Optical networking vendor Coriant announced Monday that Kheradpir has been named CEO and chairman.

After leaving Juniper, Kheradpir had joined private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners, it turns out. That's the company that assembled Coriant in 2013 from pieces that included Sycamore Networks (a fallen star of the dot-com boom) and part of the former Nokia Siemens Networks.

So in a sense, Marlin is assigning Kheradpir to Coriant. He's replacing another Marlin partner, Pat DiPietro, who will become vice chairman but is otherwise returning to his day job with the private equity firm.

Kheradpir, a former Verizon executive, joined Juniper as CEO on Jan. 1, 2014 — and was gone before 2014 was out. Technically, he resigned, but Juniper took the unusual step of specifying that the board had questioned “his conduct in connection with a particular negotiation with a customer,” a sign that retirement wasn't entirely his idea.

Sources have since told SDxCentral that Barclays and Verizon — two of Kheradpir's former employers — were the problem accounts. Kheradpir was replaced last fall by Juniper veteran Rami Rahim.

In the two years since its launch, Coriant has since made overtures into software-defined networking (SDN), targeting areas such as mobile backhaul and transport SDN.