Discover how our culture of curiosity, collaboration, and innovation comes to life during our immersive, global Tech Forum event for engineers.
A global forum for engineering innovation
This year, we brought back one of our most impactful internal events on a larger scale than ever before. Tech Forum 2026 brought together more than 5,000 team members virtually and in person across 14 global locations, including three-day takeovers of Ciena’s Ottawa and Gurugram R&D campuses.
Make the most of it. Get to know more people, compare ideas, challenge each other.
Andy Watkins, Vice President, Hardware and R&D Operations, captured the spirit and purpose of the event during his opening remarks. “We're doing something very intentional,” he said. “We're creating space to hear from our executives, to listen to customers, to share learnings, to connect with colleagues. It’s very, very important to connect with colleagues and inspire new ideas. And what's important about that—and exciting about that—is when we do that across sites, across our teams, our engineering is so much better.”
This purpose came to life over the next three days of general sessions, poster presentations, workshops, hackathons, and more. Sessions focused on the growing importance of scale, power efficiency, and performance optimization in the AI era. Our team members heard directly from leaders, customers, and industry experts on how their work makes an impact across the globe.
Building connections across teams and geographies
Tech Forum underscored the tremendous value of coming together in person, giving teams space to step away from daily tasks and engage deeply in complex technical discussions. The immersive environment enabled attendees to ask questions in real time, challenge assumptions, build on one another’s ideas, share expertise, solve problems, and strengthen connections across functions and geographies.
For Bruce Gillespie, Senior Manager, ASIC Engineering, it was this energy and focus that made the event so valuable. “This was my first Tech Forum, and I found it very beneficial and interesting,” he said. “Everyone was encouraged to take time out of their schedules to fully invest their attention and make the most out of it.”
Mohit Chhillar, Director, Software Engineering Systems, led the poster sessions in our Gurugram office, and he also highlighted the value for engineers at the start of their career. “We tried to incorporate a lot of ideas from early in career folks and give them a platform for their ideas to flow.” He emphasized the importance of engineers with varied backgrounds and experiences sharing their perspectives as crucial to innovation. “Even if it is just an inkling of a good idea, someone else can look at it or hear about it and then build on top of it. That's a very, very important aspect of how technical knowledge flows.”
Take a step back from that day-to-day treadmill, enjoy time with your colleagues, find out what they're doing, share your best practises, your ideas, get the creative juices flowing.
For many, it was also a rare opportunity to celebrate the groundbreaking work being completed by their colleagues across the organization. “Our work gets celebrated frequently at trade shows…it is not very often that we get to celebrate and showcase our work to each other,” said Melissa Trezise, Senior Manager, Software Engineering Systems. “Being able to share insights, career tips, and advice with a group of engaged engineers in a similar position to me was great. Everyone who participated in these sessions really loved them and walked away with new connections.”
Connecting engineering work to customer impact
While Tech Forum is a learning opportunity for our people, its value extends well beyond the individual experience. By bringing engineers, leaders, customers and experts together, the event helps connect day-to-day work to Ciena’s business goals, customer needs, and long-term innovation strategy.
This is where we come together and share what's working, what challenges we have, and we build the next wave of differentiation together. This is why Tech Forum matters.
Our teams heard directly how their work contributes to solving some of the industry’s most complex challenges, and where there are opportunities to do even more. “Sharing insights from customers directly with our engineers in R&D was very energizing,” said Melissa. “We want to be the best and hearing how we are helping customers and can do more for them was great.”
For Naureen Khan, Systems Design Architecture Engineer, the event emphasized both the scale of the industry opportunity and the importance of Ciena’s role within it. “It really reinforced how meaningful and forward-looking our contributions are, especially in shaping the future of networking in the AI era,” she said. She also noted the inspiring focus throughout the event on innovation, performance optimization, and solving the challenges of scaling next-generation networks.
Join the teams shaping the future of networking
By investing in opportunities for employees to connect, collaborate and think differently, we strengthen our culture of innovation, which helps our teams deliver for customers and shape what’s next for the industry.
For engineers looking for a workplace that invests in its people, values collaboration and creates space for innovation, Ciena offers the opportunity to do meaningful work alongside teams shaping the future of networking. Explore our open engineering roles and discover how you can help build what’s next.