Cloud Network Operations Engineer III

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:

Iridium is seeking a Cloud Network Operations Engineer III to join our Network Operations team, supporting, maintaining, and enhancing our Gateway cloud-native and on-prem distributed systems.  In this role, you will focus on the reliability, performance, and scalability of our Gateway platform, including the Iridium Distribution Center (IDC) subsystem, an AWS-based message broker within our Certus transport services suite.  You will work in a collaborative operations environment to support highly available and secure messaging infrastructure critical to production services.  This position blends cloud infrastructure, network operations, and automation-driven delivery practices, including CI/CD and GitOps.  You will contribute to monitoring, troubleshooting, and improving complex distributed systems while helping modernize operational processes. This role requires strong problem-solving skills in production environments and includes participation in on-call support, providing escalated tier support to all ground systems operations including Gateway Technical Ops, Tier 2 Customer Support, and Service Delivery teams.

What You’ll Do:

• Support, troubleshoot, and operate the IDC subsystem in a mission-critical, operations-focused team environment
• Collaborate with vendors, subcontractors, consultants, and internal Engineering teams to resolve outstanding issues
• Apply best practices in GitOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps, including CI/CD automation and security compliance
• Institute and maintain Gateway subsystems and services, both on-prem and cloud-based
• Maintain and improve remote monitoring and management system, including agent scripts, alert responses, dashboards, and periodic system reviews
• Identify, investigate and resolve operations issues and work closely with the Operations team to improve maintenance procedures
• Work with team members to ensure high quality products are ready to deploy into production according to the assigned schedule
• Investigate and resolve complex system issues escalated from other internal support teams
• Create and maintain maintenance documents for element systems and network infrastructure
• Work closely with the System Verification and Test (SVT) team to ensure end-to-end validation of releases
• Provide technical support to internal and external stakeholders as needed

What You’ll Need to Succeed:

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent relevant experience in lieu of degree)
• 5+ years of relevant experience in cloud infrastructure, network operations, systems engineering, or related fields
• Strong experience with Linux (Red Hat preferred) in production environments
• Solid understanding of IP networking, routing, and distributed systems concepts
• Hands-on experience with AWS services, particularly ECS and EKS
• Experience with messaging systems, distributed architectures, or integration platforms
• Working knowledge of database systems and tools such as Oracle, MySQL, SharePlex, and Toad
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git-based workflows, and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, network, and application layers
• A passion for design, development, and maintenance of real-time computing systems
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to confidently present products, deliverables, analyses, and/or issues
• Possess an analytical mindset, with the ability to understand a situation or problem and think critically to make decisions or come up with solutions

Things That Would be Great if You Brought to the Table:

• Any AWS certification (i.e., AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Advanced Networking, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, etc.)
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack)
• Practical experience of networking protocols, routers, switches, etc.
• Direct experience with systems software life cycle
• Experience in software development, especially C, C++, and Python
• Experience in IP network engineering, development, integration, and testing

We’ll also need you to:

• Be on call to support major network issues
• Be able to travel up to 10%
• This position directly performs under, supports, or is exposed to a U.S. government contract. To comply with the requirements of that U.S. government contract, applicants for this position must be U.S. citizens

Work Environment:

This position primarily works in an office setting and is largely sedentary with the majority of the position working with a computer. The role typically requires the use of basic office equipment such as a phone, video, computer, keyboard, mouse, and printer. 

We believe in-person connection drives innovation, strengthens mentorship, and builds culture, while flexibility enables employees to do their best work. Under Iridium’s Hybrid Work Policy, employees are expected to work at least three days per week (approximately 60%) in an Iridium office to support collaboration, relationship-building, and professional growth.

Additional Information

This job description outlines the general nature and level of work for this role and is not a comprehensive list of duties, responsibilities, or qualifications. Employees may be assigned additional responsibilities as needed.

Iridium is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.