Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering

TextNow•Lexington, KY

1d•Remote

About The Position

TextNow is seeking a Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering to manage the health and advancement of its mobile core platform. This role acts as a liaison between the vendor's Managed Services team and TextNow's internal engineering, product, and operations teams. The position requires deep technical expertise and strong coordination skills to ensure the core network meets the demands of a growing user base. The role offers a growth path into technical and people leadership. The company is open to candidates with strong SRE or infrastructure leadership backgrounds and deep networking knowledge, even without prior 3GPP technology experience, as they will provide 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.

Benefits

Free phone service
Strong work life blend
Flexible work arrangements (work-from-home, remote, or access to one of our office spaces)
Employee stock options
Unlimited vacation
12 paid holidays per year
Competitive pay
Health, dental, and vision benefits
Short-term & long-term disability
$750 annual wellness benefit or healthcare spending account
RRSP matching (Canada) | 401(K) (USA)
Parental leave for eligible employees
Learning & Development opportunities
Team events, company-wide off-sites