Principal Dev Ops Engineer

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 Principal Dev Ops Engineer to lead the strategy, design, and evolution of Dev Ops practices supporting our cloud-native Open RAN and 4G/5G Core network. In this role, you will set the technical direction for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automation, and observability frameworks that enable reliable, scalable operations across Core, RAN, Transport, and Cloud domains. You will define and implement greenfield CI/CD pipelines, establish standardized automation and monitoring approaches, and create advanced telemetry, alerting, and automated remediation capabilities.

Through close partnership with NOC Operations, Engineering, Cloud, Development, and Test teams, you will help drive operational excellence, reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), and minimize alert fatigue. As a technical leader within the Gateway organization, you will provide governance, best practices, and hands‑on expertise to teams across global time zones. The ideal candidate brings deep experience with cloud‑native architectures, Kubernetes, CI/CD, telemetry pipelines, and infrastructure‑as‑code, along with familiarity in telecom network environments and Agile practices.

What You'll Do:

Cloud & CI/CD Enablement Lead the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines supporting cloud-native and G-RAN deployments Manage Kubernetes environments (EKS and on-prem) by:
Monitoring CNF health Automating scaling policies Optimizing resource allocation Implement Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform and Ansible to deploy and maintain monitoring and observability stacks Integrate observability platforms and tools into operational workflows to strengthen visibility and diagnostic capabilities Observability & Monitoring Architecture Design and enhance observability frameworks using:
Grafana dashboards and alert correlation Health checks/Back Ups etc. Core CDR dashboards (IMS & Packet Core) Viavi probe integrations Solar Winds telemetry feeds Build unified dashboards that provide national‑level visibility and real‑time health insights Optimize alarm thresholds and event correlation to reduce false positives and alert storms Implement structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing for cloud‑native network functions

Automation & Self-Healing Engineering Develop automation using Python, Bash, or Go to:
Auto-triage common alarms Perform health validations Trigger corrective actions and workflows Build event‑driven automation using Kafka feeds from Mavenir and Gatehouse OSS systems Implement automated remediation for common failure scenarios (e.g., pod restarts, resource exhaustion, signaling retries) to reduce manual NOC intervention Reduce manual NOC intervention through closed-loop…