Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering

TextNow•San Francisco, CA

4d•Remote

About The Position

TextNow is looking for a hands-on Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering to own the health and evolution of our mobile core platform. Our cloud-hosted core runs in AWS, with our mobile core vendor providing managed services for day-to-day operations. This role is the critical bridge between our vendor’s Managed Services team and our internal engineering, product, and operations teams. You’ll be the technical owner of the mobile core, combining deep technical expertise with strong coordination skills. You won’t just manage vendor deliverables—you’ll dive into the technical details, challenge approaches when needed, and ensure our core network evolves to meet the demands of a growing subscriber base. This role has a clear growth path into technical and people leadership as the team scales. We know that people who have operated a mobile core at scale are rare. If you’re a strong SRE or infrastructure engineering leader with deep networking knowledge and a track record of managing complex, vendor-operated platforms, we want to hear from you—even if you haven’t worked with 3GPP technologies before. We’ll invest in helping you build the telco-specific domain knowledge.

Requirements

Experienced in SRE or Infrastructure Leadership: 7+ years in SRE, infrastructure engineering, or network engineering, with a track record of operating complex, high-availability platforms at scale.
Strong Networking Fundamentals: Deep understanding of IP networking, routing, tunneling protocols, DNS, DPI. You can reason about packet flows across distributed systems and debug from the wire up.
Vendor Management Experience: You've managed vendor or managed-service relationships for critical infrastructure. You know how to review their work, hold them accountable, and coordinate across vendor, operations, and product teams without micromanaging.
AI-First Mindset: You actively use AI tools to accelerate incident triage, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis, and continuously evolve how you apply them to raise the bar on operational excellence.
Technical Leadership & Ownership: You've provided technical direction and mentorship to other engineers, see problems before they're escalated, and drive them to resolution. You enjoy technical leadership and want to grow into leading a team.
Incident Management & Observability: Comfortable handling production incidents, analyzing root causes, and implementing long-term fixes. Hands-on experience with observability platforms like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or the ELK stack.
AWS Infrastructure: Experience with AWS (EC2, EKS, VPC networking) or equivalent cloud platform.
Comfortable Operating in Ambiguity: You don't need to have all the answers on day one, but you know how to find them. You're motivated to learn new technical domains and apply that learning quickly.

Nice To Haves

Experience with mobile core network operations (LTE/5G EPC/NSA)—hands-on experience with HSS, PGW/SGW, PCRF, or similar network functions
Understanding of 3GPP standards, Diameter, GTP, or mobile packet core architecture
Experience at an MVNO or with carrier/MVNO-specific network challenges
Familiarity with IMS or VoLTE deployments, SIP, SMPP, SMTP

Responsibilities

Own the Mobile Core Platform: Take end-to-end accountability for the health, performance, and evolution of TextNow's mobile core (HSS, PGW, PCRF, and related functions running in AWS). Drive capacity planning and platform evolution to support growing scale.
Manage Vendor Relationships: Serve as the primary technical interface with our mobile core vendor's Managed Services team and TextNow's broader carrier partners. Review vendor-proposed changes and architectural decisions, catch errors before production, and hold partners accountable to SLAs. Oversee vendor software upgrade cycles, coordinate upgrade windows, and ensure smooth rollouts.
Build AI-Driven Operational Capabilities: Design and deliver AI tooling to improve operational health, including agentic performance analysis, automated diagnostics, and accelerated root cause analysis. Continuously evolve how the team uses AI to raise the bar on operational excellence.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Provide technical direction and mentorship across the Telecom Engineering pod, growing into people leadership as the team scales.
Incident Response & On-Call Support: Participate in an on-call rotation, troubleshoot issues, and drive incident resolution to minimize downtime. Conduct post-mortems and implement corrective actions to enhance reliability.
Cross-Functional Coordination: Partner with product, engineering, and other pods to prioritize and sequence network asks. Translate internal requirements into actionable work for the team and vendors.
Platform Evolution: Contribute to the long-term technical roadmap for the core network. Develop and improve monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling for core network health. Evaluate new technologies and drive initiatives to reduce operational burden and increase automation.