Nokia is looking for a head of products for data center switching to lead the vendor’s long-term hardware roadmap as it continues its push into the data center space.

According to a job posting, the Finnish firm is looking for a product management leader based in North America. Nokia wants candidates with more than 10 years of experience in data center, carrier service provider, or mission-critical networking environments.

The remit would encompass managing resource allocations between products and services, and ensuring the successful launches of switch lines. Nokia wants candidates with “deep expertise in routing and switching technologies” and experience managing “cross-functional teams.”

Shean Leigon, Nokia’s director for AI and data center strategy, described the position in a LinkedIn post as “a high-impact leadership role for someone who can connect deep technical expertise with clear market differentiation and customer value.”

Named a "Visionary" in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for data center switching in 2025, Nokia has been aggressively pushing into the market, bidding to take advantage of the AI infrastructure boom. That effort is being spearheaded top-down by CEO and former Intel data center and AI group lead Justin Hotard.

The result has seen switch lines proliferate in the market, with notable deployments of the Gangnam Data Center (GDC) in South Korea and hyperscale cloud infrastructure for Microsoft.

Nokia’s data center push has also seen it go all in on optics, further driven by its acquisition of Infinera. The effort is already paying off as sales of optical network lines provided a revenue bump of 20% in its most recent earnings.

The vendor expanded its data center switch portfolio last November, showcasing the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) compliant 7220 Interconnect Router (IXR)-H6 series. The offering is capable of supplying up to 102.4 terabits per second (Tb/s) of throughput across interface speeds at 800 gigabits per second (Gb/s) and 1.6 Tb/s.

Its switches support embedded Network Operating System (NOS) and SONiC, though they can also be configured with Nokia’s SR Linux network operating system (NOS) to provide operators with more choice to suit their deployment needs.