Senior Analyst , AI Operations & Governance

As the global leader in high-speed connectivity, Ciena builds the critical infrastructure powering the AI era. We’re a technology company shaping the future of networking, guided by innovation, integrity, and collaboration. Through development opportunities, meaningful work, and flexibility, Ciena supports growth and well-being—on and off the job. Connect with a career that matters. Ciena is seeking a hands-on Senior Analyst, AI Operations & Governance to support the administration, operational management, and governance of enterprise AI platforms and services. The role will help operate Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, administer AI and LLM gateway capabilities, and establish consistent lifecycle controls for enterprise AI agents. The successful candidate will work across Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, Infrastructure, Data & Analytics, Legal, Privacy, and business teams to help ensure AI technologies are reliable, secure, cost-conscious, auditable, and responsibly adopted at enterprise scale. What you will do: Microsoft Copilot Administration: Administer and support Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and related Microsoft 365 AI services, including licensing, role and access management, configuration, service health, troubleshooting, and operational support. AI Platform Operations: Monitor platform health, availability, adoption, and operational readiness; support onboarding, configuration management, release readiness, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement. LLM / AI Gateway Administration: Administer enterprise LLM and AI gateway services, including provider and model onboarding, authentication, access policies, routing, rate limits, quotas, usage controls, audit logging, and operational monitoring. Agent Governance & AgentOps: Support the lifecycle governance of Copilot Studio and custom AI agents through registration, risk classification, approval, testing, deployment, monitoring, change control, recertification, and retirement. AI Security & Responsible AI Controls: Partner with Security, Privacy, Legal, and Compliance teams to operationalize guardrails for data protection, prompt injection, content safety, tool access, human oversight, and auditability. Observability & Reporting: Create and maintain dashboards and operational reporting for availability, latency, errors, token consumption, model usage, agent activity, policy violations, adoption, and cost. AI FinOps: Support budgets, quotas, showback and chargeback reporting, cost anomaly identification, and model-selection guidance to improve the economics of enterprise AI services. Service Management: Maintain runbooks, knowledge articles, standard operating procedures, service catalogs, support queues, escalation paths, SLAs, and audit evidence; coordinate incidents and problem-management activities. Automation: Use PowerShell, APIs, workflow automation, and platform tooling to reduce manual administration and improve the consistency of AI operational controls. Stakeholder Enablement: Provide practical guidance to development and business teams on approved AI services, platform onboarding, agent publishing, and operational requirements. What you bring: • Hands-on administration experience with Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and Microsoft Entra ID. • Practical experience operating an LLM Gateway, AI Gateway, API Gateway, or model access control plane in an enterprise environment. • Experience with agent governance, AgentOps, or lifecycle controls for AI agents and autonomous workflows. • Understanding of Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI, with familiarity across additional enterprise model providers or platforms such as AWS Bedrock, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. • Knowledge of authentication and authorization, secrets management, RBAC, API management, audit logging, data protection, and enterprise security controls. • Experience monitoring AI or cloud platforms using tools such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, or equivalent platforms. • Ability to analyze service health, latency, usage, token consumption, model costs, and policy-control events. • Working knowledge of IT service management practices and tools such as ServiceNow or Jira. • Automation skills using PowerShell, Python, REST APIs, Microsoft Graph, or workflow automation tools. • Strong troubleshooting, documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills. Must haves: • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, Business Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. • Typically 5+ years of experience in enterprise platform administration, cloud operations, application support, AI operations, or a related technology role. • Hands-on experience administering Microsoft 365 services and supporting enterprise SaaS or cloud platforms. • Demonstrated experience with operational governance, service management, security controls, or compliance processes. • Experience working with cross-functional technical and business stakeholders in a large enterprise environment. • Ability to participate in production support and incident escalation activities as required by the operating model. The extras you bring: • Microsoft certifications related to Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure, Security, or Copilot. • Experience implementing policy enforcement, model routing, failover, caching, rate limiting, virtual keys, token budgets, or audit controls through an AI or LLM Gateway. • Experience governing Copilot Studio agents, custom agents, plugins, connectors, APIs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions, or Model Context Protocol integrations. • Familiarity with AI evaluation, prompt and response tracing, safety testing, red teaming, and responsible AI controls. • Experience developing executive-ready operational dashb