Staff Network Reliability Engineer, RAN Operations

📋 Job Overview

Skylo has pioneered a standards-based approach to satellite connectivity. We connect smartphones and IoT devices directly to satellites. No special hardware, no entirely new networks. Just billions of existing devices, suddenly reachable anywhere on Earth. We're not building toward this future. We're already in it. Our direct-to-device service is live on millions of activated devices across five continents, covering more than 72 million square kilometers, in partnership with leading satellite operators, mobile network operators, Tier-1 chipset makers, and OEMs worldwide. And we're just getting started. At the heart of it all is Skylo's commercial NTN vRAN: a 3GPP standards-based, cloud-native platform that seamlessly bridges terrestrial and satellite networks. It's the infrastructure that makes true anywhere, anytime connectivity possible.

🏢 About Skylo

When you join Skylo, you'll work at the intersection of three markets reshaping how the world stays connected: mass-market consumer devices, automotive, and industrial IoT. Enabling people outdoors and critical workflows in the world's most remote places. This is a rare chance to work on technology that matters, at a company that's already proving it works.

🎯 The Role

As a Staff Network Reliability Engineer, RAN Operations, in the Global Product Support & Customer Success organization, you are the RAN domain authority within Skylo's production NTN network. Where the Incident Manager coordinates the bridge, you own the RF and RAN technical outcome. You are the escalation target for every RAN-domain Sev 1–2 event — the engineer who diagnoses SINR anomalies, beam coverage gaps, preamble failures, timing drift, interference conditions, and gNodeB/eNodeB hardware faults at a signal and protocol level, and delivers a resolution or a definitive root cause. On a satellite network, the RAN layer is the air interface between space and device. Every attach, every random-access attempt, every RRC connection depends on the health of Skylo's NTN vRAN. You own that health — 24×7. You define service-aligned KPIs (not vendor-default counters), lead continuous RF optimization, write and own the runbooks, set the detection logic and diagnostic standards the entire team operates against, and surface toil and failure patterns as engineering requirements. At Staff NRE level you are also a force multiplier: mentoring Senior NREs in RAN domain depth, contributing to the automation backlog with operational requirements, and partnering with RAN Product Engineering to ensure new software releases and parameter changes meet operational readiness standards before they reach production.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own 24×7 NTN RAN health across Skylo's production network: 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 — distinguish transient RF fluctuations from systemic degradation before escalating or acting.
• Execute and own RAN-domain runbooks for all fault categories: cell outage recovery, timing resynchronization, parameter rollback, restart procedures, and interference mitigation actions — without requiring engineering team involvement for covered fault classes.
• Own timing and synchronization health: GNSS lock status, Octoclock/reference clock drift, PTP/SyncE alignment, and NTN-specific timing compensation — detect and resolve timing anomalies before they cascade into access failures.
• Monitor beam-level and cell-level performance across the NTN coverage area; identify underperforming beams and initiate optimization or escalation based on defined criteria.
• Serve as the L3 escalation authority for all RAN-domain incidents: take ownership from the Incident Manager, diagnose at the RF and protocol level using eNodeB/gNodeB logs, RF telemetry, PRACH/MSG1–MSG5 analysis, RRC traces, and KPI correlation, and deliver a resolution or a decision-grade root cause.
• Lead RAN-domain troubleshooting bridges: command the technical investigation, direct vendor and engineering participants, correlate signals across RU, DU, CU-CP, CU-UP, and timing subsystems, and drive the bridge to a documented resolution or a clear engineering handoff.
• Diagnose and resolve RAN failure modes: SINR anomalies, beam coverage gaps, preamble failures (MSG1–MSG5), RRC setup failures, abnormal RRC releases, CW/narrowband/adjacent-carrier interference, cell unavailability, eCPRI link failures, and DU/CU software faults.
• Engage RAN vendors with technical specificity: reproduce failures with log evidence and RF traces, own the vendor ticket lifecycle, enforce SLA response commitments, and escalate vendor delays with full impact context.
• Participate in the global 24×7 on-call rotation as the RAN domain escalation tier — reachable within defined SLA windows for Sev 1 events; function as the technical decision-maker, not the first responder.
• Own RAN-domain RCA end-to-end: lead the post-incident investigation, document the complete causal chain from triggering RF condition or hardware event through downstream subscriber impact, and deliver systemic action items with owners, timelines, and measurable success criteria.
• Deliver Initial RCA documentation within defined SLA windows post-incident closure; own the final RCA through engineering review and sign-off.
• Identify systemic RAN failure patterns — recurring interference sources, timing drift trends, vendor software r