Principal Dev Ops Engineer

Company Overview

Iridium is an award-winning and innovative satellite communications company with bragging rights to the only network that offers voice and data connectivity anywhere in the world. For over 20 years, Iridium's unique network and services have supported critical communications needs for individuals, businesses, and the evolving Internet of Things.

At Iridium, we understand the importance of staying connected and the limitations of traditional communications networks. People across the globe, including first responders, humanitarians, global militaries, scientific researchers, and lone workers, as well as ships, aircraft and remote operations all rely on Iridium to stay connected. We take our responsibility for providing these essential communications very seriously and pride ourselves on offering a reliable lifeline when needed. Likewise, Iridium is committed to providing an exciting and innovative workplace, where employees are challenged to think outside the box and collaborate on new, bold ideas and solutions. Our talented teams are passionate about their work and the impact our company makes around the world. Iridium fosters an empowering and inclusive culture that allows employees to genuinely be their best selves. We are looking for others who want to join this truly unique company that celebrates our employees and provides the opportunity to truly make a difference in the world.

What We're Looking For:

We are seeking a highly skilled Principal DevOps Engineer to lead the strategy, design, and evolution of DevOps practices supporting our cloud-native Open RAN and 4G/5G Core network. In this role, you will set the technical direction for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automation, and observability frameworks that enable reliable, scalable operations across Core, RAN, Transport, and Cloud domains. You will define and implement greenfield CI/CD pipelines, establish standardized automation and monitoring approaches, and create advanced telemetry, alerting, and automated remediation capabilities. Through close partnership with NOC Operations, Engineering, Cloud, Development, and Test teams, you will help drive operational excellence, reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), and minimize alert fatigue. As a technical leader within the Gateway organization, you will provide governance, best practices, and hands?on expertise to teams across global time zones. The ideal candidate brings deep experience with cloud?native architectures, Kubernetes, CI/CD, telemetry pipelines, and infrastructure?as?code, along with familiarity in telecom network environments and Agile practices.

What You'll Do:

Cloud & CI/CD Enablement

• Lead the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines supporting cloud-native and G-RAN deployments
• Manage Kubernetes environments (EKS and on-prem) by:
  • Monitoring CNF health
  • Automating scaling policies
  • Optimizing resource allocation
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform and Ansible to deploy and maintain monitoring and observability stacks
• Integrate observability platforms and tools into operational workflows to strengthen visibility and diagnostic capabilities

Observability & Monitoring Architecture

• Design and enhance observability frameworks using:
  • Grafana dashboards and alert correlation
  • Health checks/Back Ups etc.
  • Core CDR dashboards (IMS & Packet Core)
  • Viavi probe integrations
  • SolarWinds telemetry feeds
• Build unified dashboards that provide national?level visibility and real?time health insights
• Optimize alarm thresholds and event correlation to reduce false positives and alert storms
• Implement structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing for cloud?native network functions

Automation & Self-Healing Engineering

• Develop automation using Python, Bash, or Go to:
  • Auto-triage common alarms
  • Perform health validations
  • Trigger corrective actions and workflows
• Build event?driven automation using Kafka feeds from Mavenir and Gatehouse OSS systems
• Implement automated remediation for common failure scenarios (e.g., pod restarts, resource exhaustion, signaling retries) to reduce manual NOC intervention
• Reduce manual NOC intervention through closed-loop automation
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) for monitoring stack deployments
• Integrate observability tools into DevSecOps workflows

Incident & Reliability Engineering

• Support Major Incident Management by providing telemetry insights, automated diagnostics, and post?incident analyses
• Perform post-incident analysis using logs, traces, and performance metrics
• Drive improvements that reduce MTTD and MTTR
• Partner with Core, RAN, Transport, and Cloud engineering teams to prevent recurring issues through root?cause analysis

Leadership & Continuous Improvement

• Mentor junior DevOps and NOC engineers in automation, observability, and DevOps best practices
• Develop reusable automation frameworks and operational standards
• Document playbooks, reference architectures, and best?practice patterns to mature operations from reactive to predictive

What You'll Need to Succeed:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications, or related field
• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or network automation roles supporting cloud?native environments
• Strong proficiency with CI/CD pipeline management, Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks, and containerized deployments
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS and on-prem K8s) and Docker-based cloud-native network functions (CNFs)
• Proficiency with AWS cloud services
• Advanced Python scripting skills, with additional experience in Bash or Go
• Experience building Grafana dashboards, alerting logic, and observability workflows
• Familiarity with Kafka-based event streaming architectures
• Strong Linux system administration skills
• Strong understanding of telecom architecture, including 4G EPC, 5G Core, IMS, Open RAN
• Experience integrating and operationalizing probe-based observability solutions (e.g., Viavi)
• Deep understanding of monitoring concepts, including metrics, logs, traces, and APM
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey products, deliverables, analyses, and/or issues clearly and confidently, and recognize and adapt to different communication techniques
• Be able to analyze a situation or problem, generate effective solutions, and see those solutions through to completion
• Must possess the creativity and resourcefulness needed to make reliable decisions and determine methods on new assignments
• Can thrive in a dynamic environment by handling multiple tasks and managing shifting priorities
• Be proactive in sharing knowledge you've learned with others

Things That Would be Great if You Brought to the Table:

• Experience supporting Mavenir 4G/5G Core in production
• Knowledge of SIP, Diameter, GTP, HTTP/2, PFCP protocols
• Experience with Prometheus, ELK stack, or OpenTelemetry
• CI/CD experience (GitLab, Jenkins, ArgoCD)
• Kubernetes certification (CKA/CKAD)
• AWS certifications
• Experience building closed-loop automation for telecom NOCs

We'll also need you to:

• Participate in on-call rotations for automation platform support
• Support major incidents requiring automation troubleshooting
• Travel up to 10% if needed

Work Environment:

This position primarily works in an office setting and is largely sedentary with the majority of the position working with a computer. The role typically requires the use of basic office equipment such as a phone, video, computer, keyboard, mouse, and printer.

We believe in-person connection drives innovation, strengthens mentorship, and builds culture, while flexibility enables employees to do their best work. Under Iridium's Hybrid Work Policy, employees are expected to work at least three days per week (approximately 60%) in an Iridium office to support collaboration, relationship-building, and professional growth.

Additional Information

This job description outlines the general nature and level of work for this role and is not a comprehensive list of duties, responsibilities, or qualifications. Employees may be assigned additional responsibilities as needed.

Iridium is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.