Staff Network Reliability Engineer, RAN Operations

Skylo Technologies • Mountain View, CA

1d • $160,000 - $170,000 • Remote

About The Position

The Staff Network Reliability Engineer, RAN Operations, in the Global Product Support & Customer Success organization, is the RAN domain authority within Skylo's production NTN network. This role owns the RF and RAN technical outcome for incidents, serving as the escalation target for RAN-domain Sev 1–2 events. The engineer diagnoses SINR anomalies, beam coverage gaps, preamble failures, timing drift, interference conditions, and gNodeB/eNodeB hardware faults at a signal and protocol level, delivering resolutions or root causes. The role involves owning the health of the RAN layer, which is the air interface between space and device on a satellite network. Responsibilities include defining service-aligned KPIs, leading continuous RF optimization, writing and owning runbooks, setting detection logic and diagnostic standards, and identifying toil and failure patterns for engineering requirements. As a Staff NRE, this role also acts as a force multiplier by mentoring Senior NREs, contributing to the automation backlog, and partnering with RAN Product Engineering to ensure operational readiness of new releases and parameter changes.

Requirements

• 8–10+ years of experience in RAN engineering and operations in a production 24x7 environment (carrier or vendor side), with direct ownership of live LTE/5G RAN infrastructure.
• NTN or satellite RAN experience strongly preferred.
• Deep 3GPP RAN expertise: TS 38.300, NR/LTE-NTN procedures, NB-IoT/LTE-M/5G-NR air interfaces, UE random-access procedures (PRACH/MSG1–5), RRC state machine, and beam management.
• Extensive understanding of vRAN/ORAN architecture: 7-2x split functions, RU/DU/CU-CP/CU-UP component roles, eCPRI/CPRI interfaces, and virtualized RAN software systems.
• Production RAN troubleshooting: demonstrated ability to diagnose SINR anomalies, beam coverage gaps, preamble failures, timing drift, interference conditions (CW, narrowband, adjacent carrier), and RU/DU/CU hardware and software faults using RF telemetry and gNB logs.
• RF and timing domain knowledge: GNSS, PTP, SyncE, Octoclock/reference clock behavior, and NTN-specific timing compensation mechanisms.
• Production observability: Prometheus/Grafana/in house tools for RAN KPI dashboarding; OSS alarm integration (SNMP, Pub/Sub, or equivalent).
• Packet capture and trace analysis: proficiency with Wireshark or equivalent for L2/L3 call flows, PCAP analysis, and gNB trace decoding.
• Kubernetes operational literacy: pod health monitoring for DU/CU workloads, kubectl proficiency, log aggregation and correlation.
• Runbook authorship: ability to write RAN diagnostic procedures at the level where a less-experienced engineer can execute them independently.
• Strong written and verbal communication: capable of delivering RCA documents, engineering escalations, and MNO-facing technical summaries.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with NTN or satellite RAN operations: NTN-specific random-access timing, satellite beam management, and coverage optimization over LEO/GEO constellations.
• RF design, optimization, and performance improvement experience — parameter tuning, coverage analysis, interference hunting.
• Experience with RAN vendors: Samsung, Mavenir, Fujitsu, Nokia — including vendor CLI tools, log formats, counter definitions, and support escalation processes.
• Deep understanding of LTE, VoLTE, 5G VoNR L2/L3 call flows with ability to analyze traces.
• Scripting ability in Python or Bash — sufficient to automate RF log parsing, KPI extraction, or build diagnostic utilities.
• Experience contributing to closed-loop automation requirements or service assurance platform development for RAN event categories.
• Knowledge of cloud-native environments (GKE, AWS) hosting virtualized RAN functions.

Responsibilities

• Own 24x7 NTN RAN health across Skylo's production network, including gNodeB/eNodeB status, node availability, attach and access success rates, RRC setup and abnormal release behavior, RF integrity (SINR, RSSI, noise floor stability), and RAN-layer SLA compliance.
• Monitor and triage RAN alarms using OSS dashboards, Grafana/inhouse telemetry, and NTN-specific alarm patterns, distinguishing transient RF fluctuations from systemic degradation.
• Execute and own RAN-domain runbooks for fault categories like cell outage recovery, timing resynchronization, parameter rollback, restart procedures, and interference mitigation.
• Own timing and synchronization health, including GNSS lock status, Octoclock/reference clock drift, PTP/SyncE alignment, and NTN-specific timing compensation.
• Monitor beam-level and cell-level performance, identifying underperforming beams and initiating optimization or escalation.
• Serve as the L3 escalation authority for RAN-domain incidents, diagnosing at the RF and protocol level and delivering resolutions or root causes.
• Lead RAN-domain troubleshooting bridges, directing technical investigations and participants.
• Diagnose and resolve RAN failure modes such as SINR anomalies, beam coverage gaps, preamble failures, RRC setup failures, abnormal RRC releases, interference, cell unavailability, eCPRI link failures, and DU/CU software faults.
• Engage RAN vendors with technical specificity, managing ticket lifecycles and SLAs.
• Participate in the global 24x7 on-call rotation as the RAN domain escalation tier.
• Own RAN-domain RCA end-to-end, documenting causal chains and delivering systemic action items.
• Identify systemic RAN failure patterns and translate them into engineering requirements.
• Contribute to weekly and monthly Network Performance Reports.
• Define, implement, and refine RAN KPIs.
• Lead continuous optimization of Skylo's live NTN RAN.
• Proactively track RAN availability and performance metrics against MNO SLA commitments.
• Partner with Change Management to ensure safe execution of RAN configuration changes.
• Author, own, and maintain all RAN-domain runbooks and SOPs.
• Define the diagnostic decision tree for each known RAN fault class.
• Translate RAN behavior into operational artifacts that scale, including detection logic and alert thresholds.
• Identify runbook gaps and prioritize closure.
• Partner with RAN Product Engineering on software release readiness.
• Collaborate with Core NRE on end-to-end subscriber path issues.
• Collaborate with Cloud Infrastructure NRE on Kubernetes-layer issues affecting RAN NFs.
• Surface toil and automation opportunities to the Service Assurance & Automation team.
• Mentor Senior NREs in RAN domain depth.
• Work closely with RAN vendors for incident resolution and RCA.
• Engage Skylo's RAN engineering team with full operational context for escalations.
• Support MNO partner technical discussions on RAN-layer SLA definitions, coverage performance, and NTN-specific RF behavior.

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