Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering

About the role

We are looking for a hands-on Tech Lead, Mobile Core Network Engineering to own the health and evolution of our mobile core platform. Our cloud-hosted core runs in AWS, with our mobile core vendor providing managed services for day-to-day operations. This role is the critical bridge between our vendor’s Managed Services team and our internal engineering, product, and operations teams.

What You'll Do

• 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 agent-based 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.

Who You Are

• 7+ years operating highly available production infrastructure in the cloud (AWS preferred)
• Background in Site Reliability, Infrastructure, Platform, or Network Engineering
• Strong networking fundamentals and production troubleshooting: routing, DNS, load balancing, VPNs, firewalls
• Experience managing external vendors and their deliverables, not just working alongside them
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience
• Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar)
• Track record leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams
• Comfortable owning production incident response and on-call

Nice to Have

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
• Experience with a language such as Go, Python, or similar scripting languages
• Experience with carrier, telecom, networking, or mobile infrastructure