Principal Automation and AI Operations Engineer
AST SpaceMobile2 months ago
Responsibilities
- Define, lifecycle-manage, and document the NAS and NCC SKUs within the Gateway.
- Design and build automated test frameworks and scripts for Gateway RF chain, baseband, BPMS, eNB/gNB, networking, and NCC/OSS interfaces.
- Drive pre- and post-deployment validation against golden configuration and performance baselines.
- Align test plans and pass/fail criteria with RF, hardware, and software engineering teams and support field trials and FOAs.
- Enable end-to-end Gateway visibility and management with Operations and OSS teams.
- Automate repetitive operating and engineering tasks and build event-driven remediation workflows.
- Integrate telemetry with operational decision engines and develop predictive failure and capacity models.
- Create automated incident triage workflows and engineering assistants for troubleshooting.
- Establish guardrails for AI-driven operational actions and develop digital representations of network and service state.
- Automate pre-deployment configuration validation and measure automation coverage and manual-touch reduction.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of experience in network automation, DevOps/SRE, or operations engineering, ideally in telecom, networking, or satellite ground-segment environments.
- Experience building automated test frameworks that replace manual validation procedures at scale.
- Experience defining and lifecycle-managing hardware/software SKUs and associated acceptance criteria.
- Experience supporting field trials, FOAs, or first-deployment validation for new network products.
- Hands-on competence in network automation, Python, Go or similar languages, infrastructure as code, event-driven systems, workflow automation, data engineering, machine learning, AIOps, autonomous remediation, digital twins, and policy-driven operations.
- Experience integrating telemetry pipelines with operational decision engines or automated remediation systems.
- Preferred: experience with highly autonomous operations models; NAS and NCC systems or equivalent core network/operations-support platforms; predictive or ML-based failure detection or capacity planning; satellite, RF, or baseband subsystems; digital twins or simulation models; and governance or guardrails for AI-driven operational actions.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration, communication, analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, organizational, and time-management skills.
About AST SpaceMobile
AST SpaceMobile builds a space-based cellular broadband network that connects directly to standard smartphones, selling capacity to mobile network operators and government users. The public company, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Midland, Texas, trades on NASDAQ. It has demonstrated direct 4G/5G voice and data links from its BlueWalker 3 test satellite and is developing commercial satellites to extend coverage to remote and underserved areas.