Network Integration Engineer & PhD Researcher

Safia Kalwar

Designing, integrating, and operating scalable, cloud-native network management systems for Tier-1 telecom operators — bridging research innovation with production-grade engineering at Nokia.

Get in Touch LinkedIn GitHub
6+
Years Experience
PhD
Computer Engineering
3
Publications
Tier-1
Telecom Operators
// About
Building the future of
cloud-native networking

Network Integration Engineer at Nokia with a PhD in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano and 6+ years of combined industry and research experience across telecommunications, cloud-native architectures, and secure network infrastructures.

At Nokia, I work extensively with network virtualization, Altiplano Access Management System (AMS), Kubernetes, containerized microservices, software-defined networking (SDN), and network security — contributing to carrier-grade, cloud-native network management and orchestration solutions.

My role spans system integration, automation, observability, and reliability engineering, ensuring production-ready platforms that meet performance, scalability, and compliance requirements for European Telecom operators.

Kubernetes
SDN
Cloud-Native
Network Security
Docker
Microservices
Computer Vision
OpenCV
Python
NLP / ML
Apache Spark
Big Data
AMS / Altiplano
Observability
Reliability Eng.
Automation
// Experience
Professional journey
September 2023 — Present
NI FN SDN Integration Engineer
Nokia
Milan, Lombardy, Italy
Working extensively with network virtualization, Altiplano AMS, Kubernetes, containerized microservices, SDN, and network security. Contributing to carrier-grade, cloud-native network management and orchestration solutions spanning system integration, automation, observability, and reliability engineering.
May 2019 — September 2023
Doctoral Researcher
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy
Developed SMART (Mapping & Annotation Recommendation Tool), a novel framework combining NLP, Machine Learning, Word2Vec embeddings, and structural analysis to automatically generate mappings between XML Schema (XSD) and OWL ontologies for automated data interoperability.
January 2018 — March 2019
Network Communications Engineer
Capgemini
Vimercate, Lombardy, Italy
Developed enterprise mobile diagnostic applications for telecom operators. Engineered scalable Big Data pipelines using Apache Spark, SparkR, and Spark Streaming for high-velocity telecom datasets. Leveraged R programming for statistical modeling, predictive analytics, and anomaly detection.
October 2016 — December 2017
MS Thesis Researcher
Politecnico di Milano — EU Horizon 2020 DICE Project
Milan, Italy
Evaluated performance degradation and cost impact of privacy-preserving mechanisms on Big Data systems. Benchmarked Apache Spark 2.0 queries on Azure HDInsight processing up to 30 million records using Cassandra, Kafka, and Spark SQL.
February 2016 — September 2016
Graduate Research Assistant
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology
Jamshoro, Pakistan
Contributed to academic research in core and emerging areas of computing, including literature review, problem formulation, experimental design, and development of research prototypes.
// Education
Academic foundation
PhD in Computer Engineering
Politecnico di Milano
2019 — 2023
Engineer's Degree, Computer Systems
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology
2011 — 2015
// Research & Publications
Published work
01
Automated Mapping for Semantic-based Conversion of Transportation Data Formats
02
Performance Degradation and Cost Impact Evaluation of Privacy Preserving Mechanisms in Big Data Systems
03
Practical DevOps for Big Data / Quality Optimisation
// Let's connect
Get in touch

Open to collaboration, research opportunities, and interesting conversations about cloud-native networking and beyond.

LinkedIn GitHub