Network Observability & Automation Engineer III

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 Network Observability & Automation Engineer to lead observability, monitoring, and automation activities within a 24x7 Network Operations Center (NOC) environment supporting a cloud-native Open RAN and 4/5G Core network. In this role, you will participate in the design and optimization of monitoring frameworks, alerting strategies, and automated remediation workflows across Core (Mavenir), RAN (Mavenir/Samsung), Transport, and Cloud domains. You will work closely with NOC operations, Engineering, and Cloud teams to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), minimize alert fatigue, and improve overall service reliability through automation and data-driven insights. Success in this role requires solid knowledge of cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes-based environments, CI/CD pipelines, telemetry pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code, combined with telecom domain knowledge.

What You'll Do:

Observability & Monitoring Architecture

• Participate in the design and enhancement of observability frameworks using:
  
  • Grafana dashboards and alert correlation
  • Health checks/Back Ups etc.
  • Core CDR dashboards (IMS & Packet Core)
  • Probe integrations
  • All telemetry feeds
• Build unified dashboards providing national-level visibility across GRAN, Core, and Transport
• Optimize alarm thresholds to reduce false positives and alert storms
• Implement structured logging, metrics, and tracing for cloud-native network functions (CNFs)

Automation & Self-Healing Engineering

• Develop automation scripts (Python, Bash, Go) to:
  
  • Auto-triage common alarms
  • Perform health validations
  • Trigger corrective workflows
• Build event-driven automation using Kafka feeds from Mavenir and Gatehouse OSS
• Implement auto-remediation for common failure scenarios (e.g., pod restarts, resource exhaustion, signaling retries)
• Reduce manual NOC intervention through closed-loop automation

Cloud & CI/CD Enablement

• Support CI/CD pipelines for Core and G-RAN cloud-native deployments
• Work with Kubernetes (EKS Cloud) to:
  
  • Monitor CNF health
  • Automate scaling policies
  • Optimize resource allocation
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) for monitoring stack deployments
• Integrate observability tools into DevSecOps workflows

Incident & Reliability Engineering

• Support Major Incident Management with telemetry insights and automated diagnostics
• Perform post-incident analysis using logs, traces, and performance metrics
• Suggest and implement improvements that reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
• Partner with Core (Mavenir), RAN, Transport, and Cloud engineering teams for root cause prevention

Continuous Improvement

• Develop automation standards and reusable frameworks
• Document automation playbooks and observability architecture
• Take the lead on activities to mature NOC operations from reactive to predictive
• Mentor junior DevOps and NOC engineers in automation best practices

What You'll Need to Succeed:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications, or related field OR equivalent relevant experience In lieu of degree
• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Network Automation roles
• Strong experience with:
  
  • Kubernetes (EKS, on-prem K8s)
  • Docker/containerized network functions (CNFs)
  • AWS cloud environments
  • Ansible and Terraform
• Solid scripting skills (Python required)
• Experience building Grafana dashboards and alert logic
• Familiarity with Kafka event streaming architectures
• Strong Linux system administration skills
• Understanding of telecom architecture (4G EPC, 5G Core, IMS, Open RAN)
• Experience integrating probe-based observability (Viavi or similar)
• Solid understanding of monitoring concepts: metrics, logs, traces, APM
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to confidently present products, deliverables, analyses, and/or issues
• Possess an analytical mindset, with the ability to understand a situation or problem and think critically to make decisions or come up with solutions
• Be comfortable managing upward, including being a proactive communicator and asking for help when needed

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 (i.e., AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Advanced Networking, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, etc.)
• Experience building closed-loop automation for telecom NOCs

We'll also need you to:

• Be able to work in a 24x7x365 NOC-supporting environment
• 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. This is a fully onsite position requiring in-office attendance 5 days a week, 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.