Senior Network Reliability Engineer, Incident Management

Skylo Technologies • Mountain View, CA

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Network Reliability Engineer (NRE) for Incident Management is a critical role within Skylo's Global Product Support & Customer Success organization. This position serves as the operational nerve center for the company's 24x7 incident response function, taking ownership from the initial alert through to full service restoration. In a network where millions of devices rely on satellite connectivity, effective incident coordination is paramount. The Senior NRE will operate across Skylo's global hubs (Mountain View, Espoo, Bengaluru) and across all network domains, including RAN, 5G Core, Cloud Infrastructure, and OSS. The primary goal is to ensure incidents are rapidly triaged, escalated, and resolved with speed and discipline, thereby assuring Skylo's network availability commitments to MNO partners and meeting SLA obligations.

Requirements

• 5-10+ years of experience in telecom/wireless operations, network operations, or NRE in a production 24x7 environment.
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage incident bridge calls: open the war room, maintain bridge discipline, drive to resolution, and produce a structured incident record.
• Strong understanding of telecom network environments and 5G functional components, with sufficient knowledge of RAN (CUSM, eCPRI, PTP/SyncE), 5G Core (AMF, SMF, UPF), and Cloud/OSS to triage intelligently and escalate with context.
• Incident and outage management expertise: ability to prioritize by urgency and impact, manage multiple simultaneous events, and operate effectively under high-pressure 24x7 conditions.
• Hands-on experience with at least one observability platform: Grafana dashboards, Prometheus alerting, Loki log queries, or equivalent, with the ability to independently navigate to relevant signals during an active incident.
• Kubernetes operational literacy: able to run kubectl get pods, describe a failing pod, read container logs, and identify health issues at the level needed to triage and escalate a platform-layer incident.
• Structured written communication: capable of producing clear incident timelines, executive stakeholder updates, and post-incident summaries under time pressure.
• Ticketing system proficiency (Jira, ServiceNow, or equivalent): incident lifecycle management, escalation workflows, and backlog hygiene.
• On-call tooling experience (PagerDuty or equivalent): alert acknowledgement, escalation policy management, and on-call scheduling.
• Ability to span departments and build strong working relationships with RAN, Core, Cloud, Engineering, and external partner teams to drive joint incident resolution.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience in a satellite, NTN, or space-to-ground connectivity operational environment.
• Experience with OSS/BSS platforms: FCAPS alarm management, event correlation, SNMP trap handling, or EMS integration.
• Familiarity with 3GPP NAS/NG-AP signaling flows, RRC state machine, or IMSI lifecycle procedures.
• ITIL Foundation certification or demonstrated practical application of ITIL incident, problem, and change management processes.
• Scripting ability in Python or Bash, sufficient to automate repetitive operational tasks, parse log output, or build quick diagnostic utilities.
• Experience supporting hypercare operations, major network launches, or high-risk change windows.
• Exposure to closed-loop automation frameworks or service assurance platforms used in network operations.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the central command point during all network degradations, service disruptions, and subscriber-impacting events, opening the bridge, initiating the incident management process, and maintaining command from first alert through full-service restoration.
• Own end-to-end incident lifecycle management for Sev 1-4: initiate bridge calls, identify the cause and impacted domain, page the correct on-call NRE, maintain bridge discipline with clear ownership and timelines, and drive to restoration.
• Prioritize incidents according to urgency and business impact, classifying severity accurately using alarm signatures, subscriber impact data, and domain KPI telemetry from available OSS systems.
• Escalate to subject matter experts in Operations and Engineering teams when critical or time-sensitive resolution is required, providing full technical context, a structured problem statement, and a documented timeline.
• Engage and interface with vendor support teams (RAN vendor, Core vendor, cloud infrastructure) when incident resolution requires external escalation; track vendor SLA response and escalate vendor delays to the domain NRE.
• Support hypercare operations during major network launches, high-risk change windows, and special events, maintaining readiness and acting as first responder for any degradation during the hypercare window.
• Ensure all trouble tickets are created promptly in the incident management system (Jira/ServiceNow) with complete technical details, troubleshooting steps, MOPs followed, and outcome documentation, never closing an incident with an incomplete ticket.
• Produce a structured incident timeline artifact within two hours of closure: sequence of events, alarms triggered, actions taken, bridge participants, and all open action items with assigned owners and due dates.
• Manage the open incident backlog at optimum levels: track ageing tickets, escalate stalled items, and ensure no incident closes without a documented resolution path or a justified deferral.
• Coordinate post-incident review (PIR) scheduling: compile the incident record, gather logs from in-house observability tools and other relevant sources, and deliver a structured problem statement to the domain NREs owning the root cause analysis.
• Handle internal, external, and MNO partner incident escalations and follow-ups; interface with Market Operations, OEM contacts, and partner NOCs for joint incident resolution, ensuring external-facing communications are approved before transmission.
• Assure that Skylo's operated network meets agreed availability KPIs and MNO partner SLA commitments, proactively tracking availability metrics and flagging degradation trends before they breach SLA thresholds.
• Track top recurring issues and feed continuous improvement inputs: document repeat-incident patterns, identify the operational gap (missing runbook, stale threshold, absent alert), and route findings to the appropriate domain NRE for action.
• Contribute to the weekly and monthly Network Performance Report: incident count by severity and domain, MTTR trends, top issues, SLA compliance summary, and KPI deviation analysis.
• Drive proactive measures for network issue detection and isolation, actively participating in the Service Assurance and Automation domain and providing operational input for closed-loop automation requirements.
• Participate in the global follow-the-sun on-call rotation as the incident coordination tier: Espoo shift bridges the US overnight window, while Mountain View and Bengaluru shifts cover their respective regions, maintaining 24x7 continuous coverage.
• Maintain shift handoff hygiene: produce a written end-of-shift summary covering open incidents, degraded components, active change windows, vendor escalations in flight, and priority items for the incoming shift.
• Manage the on-call paging workflow: acknowledge alerts within SLA target windows, escalate to L2 within defined thresholds, and ensure no alert goes unacknowledged across the shift boundary.
• Support planned maintenance and change windows: validate pre-change observability coverage, confirm rollback readiness with the NI team, and execute rollback runbooks if a deployment causes service degradation.
• Work in close collaboration across multiple Skylo functions during incidents: RAN NRE, Core NRE, Cloud Infrastructure NRE, BOSS (BSS & OSS), Network Implementation, Product Engineering and Market teams, coordinating without creating confusion by maintaining a single source of truth on the bridge.
• Engage appropriate stakeholders based on incident signature, subscriber impact, and domain ownership, avoiding over-escalation and under-escalation with disciplined severity classification.
• Interface with MNO partner NOC teams during shared-impact events: relay technical status updates, manage the partner communication cadence, and escalate partner requests through the correct internal channel.
• Surface repetitive manual incident steps to the service assurance automation team, documenting the step, frequency, and toil cost as structured input to the automation backlog.
• Maintain working knowledge of RAN architecture relevant to incident triage: CUSM (Control plane, User plane, Synchronization plane, Management plane), eCPRI/CPRI interfaces, PTP and SyncE timing, Netconf, and NTN-specific RAN alarm patterns.
• Understand 5G Core network function roles (AMF, SMF, UPF, NRF, PCF, SEPP) at a level sufficient to classify an alarm, identify subscriber impact, and escalate with technical context.
• Operate virtualized NTN infrastructure observability tools: navigate Grafana dashboards, learn and use custom in-house tooling capabilities, run kubectl commands to assess pod health, and correlate OSS alarms with underlying infrastructure events.
• Build domain depth progressively across the first 12 months; the Senior NRE role is a structured development track toward Staff NRE and Principal NRE, where independent incident command and domain ownership are the primary accountabilities.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation packages including a stock option-based equity program
• Comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, vision, and retirement plan
• Monthly allowances for wellness and education reimbursement
• A generous time-off policy, holidays, and the opportunity to temporarily work abroad

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed