Manager, Gateway Operations
SES Satellites · McLean, VA · 4 days ago
ManagementFull-time
Primary Responsibilities / Key Result Areas
- Lead Level-2 Gateway Operations for global RF gateways, ensuring effective shift coverage, operator direction, disciplined handovers, and structured troubleshooting across all teleports.
- Provide operational escalation and after-hours support during critical incidents, and lead or participate in major incident bridges to ensure rapid triage, clear communication, and coordinated resolution.
- Develop, maintain, and govern operator-ready SOPs, MOPs, troubleshooting flows, and commissioning procedures, ensuring consistency and disciplined process adoption across the global operation.
- Manage change control for gateway operations, including intake, scheduling, risk/backout planning, and post-change validation, ensuring all activities are properly documented and operationally sound.
- Validate new gateway builds and service readiness, ensuring alarms, access, documentation, monitoring, and KPIs are accurate, meaningful, and fully accepted before entering service.
- Develop team capability through structured training plans, cross-training programs, coaching, and ongoing skill development to ensure full readiness across all gateway functions.
- Coordinate Smart Hands and site-access workflows, including request management, onsite support coordination, and cost-visibility to support operations and maintenance activities.
- Drive continuous improvement by maintaining an operations improvement backlog, implementing automation and AI-assisted tooling, improving dashboards and telemetry, and identifying opportunities to enhance service quality and operational stability.
Competencies
- Demonstrates strong leadership in an operational environment, providing clear direction, prioritization, and decisive action during live incidents.
- Applies structured troubleshooting methods, leads major incident bridges, and ensures effective escalation and rapid, coordinated resolution.
- Develops, maintains, and enforces SOPs, MOPs, troubleshooting flows, and commissioning procedures, ensuring consistency and engineering rigor across all gateways.
- Manages change intake, risk assessment, scheduling, and post-change validation; ensures new systems meet operational acceptance standards, including alarms, documentation, and monitoring.
- Validates dashboards, KPIs, alarms, and telemetry for accuracy and meaningful visibility; analyzes incident and performance trends to drive systemic improvements.
- Buils a high-performing team through coaching, structured training, cross-training, and role-based development plans; fosters a culture of accountability and operational excellence.
- Communicates clearly with L3 engineering, Field Engineering, NOC, and leadership; provides concise reporting and coordinates Smart Hands and site-access workflows effectively.
- Maintains an operations improvement backlog, leads initiatives that enhance service quality and efficiency, and champions practical automation and AI assistance to reduce toil and optimize workflows.
Qualifications & Experience
- Engineering degree (Electrical/Telecommunications) or equivalent hands-on experience in satellite gateway/teleport operations.
- 7–10+ years experience in gateway/teleport/satellite ground operations with substantial incident/change management exposure.
- Proven leadership in 24×7 operational environments, managing distributed teams.
- Demonstrated experience writing effective MOPs/SOPs and leading service-restoration bridges.
- Hands-on experience with ServiceNow, monitoring/observability platforms, and workforce scheduling tools.
- Familiarity with next-generation gateway systems (HTS, SES-17, mPOWER) and tools such as SATNMS, Kratos products.
- Exposure to Azure DevOps or similar operational backlog management platforms.
- ITIL literacy; understanding of alarm semantics, redundancy, and risk management.
Other Key Requirements / Comments
- Ensure after hours availability, when required, to address critical incidents and management escalations.
- Job requires 5% travel