Principal Automation and AI Operations Engineer

The role

This person will support the definition, lifecycle management, and documentation of NAS and NCC SKUs within the Gateway. They will design automated test frameworks and scripts for Gateway subsystems and drive pre- and post-deployment validation.

What you will do

• Define, lifecycle-manage, and document the NAS and NCC SKUs within the Gateway.
• Design and build automated test frameworks and scripts for Gateway subsystems.
• Drive pre- and post-deployment validation on each Gateway SKU.
• Partner with RF, hardware, and software engineering teams on test plans and field trials.
• Work with Operations and OSS teams to enable end-to-end visibility of the Gateway.
• Automate repetitive operating and engineering tasks.
• Integrate telemetry with operational decision engines.
• Create automated incident triage and build engineering assistants.
• Establish guardrails for AI-driven operational actions and develop digital twins.
• Automate configuration validation prior to deployment.

Required qualifications

• 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.
• Building automated test frameworks that replace manual validation procedures at scale.
• Defining and lifecycle-managing hardware/software SKUs and associated acceptance criteria.
• Supporting field trials, FOAs, or first-deployment validation for new network products.
• Hands-on competence in Python, Go, or similar languages.
• Hands-on competence in infrastructure as code.
• Hands-on competence in event-driven systems.
• Hands-on competence in workflow automation.
• Hands-on competence in data engineering.
• Hands-on competence in machine learning.
• Hands-on competence in AIOps, autonomous remediation, digital twins, and policy-driven operations.

Nice to have

• Experience building or operating toward a highly autonomous operations model.
• Familiarity with NAS and NCC systems, or equivalent core network/operations-support platforms.
• Experience with predictive/ML-based failure detection or capacity planning models in a production network.
• Familiarity with satellite, RF, or baseband subsystems and their test/validation requirements.
• Experience developing digital twins or simulation models of network/service state.
• Background establishing governance or guardrails for AI-driven or autonomous operational actions.

Before you apply

• Ability to travel periodically to support deployment, integration, testing, and operational activities.

About the company

AST SpaceMobile and its global partners are building the first and only space-based cellular broadband network to be accessible by standard smartphones.