Mobile Core Engineer (Remote)
Indexed description
We operate a mobile core spread across multiple data centres with several roaming partners and a range of vendor platforms.
The opportunity
This is a hands-on operations role. You'll spend your time debugging real subscriber issues, working pcap traces, coordinating with roaming partners and vendors, and keeping the mobile core healthy. The work is deep protocol-level investigation combined with practical platform operations.
The Role
Subscriber & connectivity troubleshooting
- Investigate end-to-end attachment failures across S6a (Diameter), MAP (SS7), GTP-C, and GTP-U
- Decode pcap traces from DRA, STP, and GTP proxy capture points to isolate signalling failures
- Trace individual IMSIs across protocols and partner networks to find where sessions break
- Diagnose DNN/APN routing mismatches, IMSI-pinned APN gaps, and private wireless gateway configuration issues
- Handle customer-reported SIM connectivity issues end-to-end — from initial report through root cause to fix
- Manage and troubleshoot HSS/HLR, DRAs (freeDiameter with custom Python transforms), STPs, PGWs, SMFs, and GTP proxies (Go)
- Work with etcd-based steering/blocking infrastructure (forbidden PLMNs, platform-level blocking, 3G blocking)
- Operate the GTP proxy routing database (IMSI groups, IMSI-pinned APNs, cache invalidation)
- Participate in vendor management — escalating and driving resolution with platform vendors and roaming partner NOCs
- Support sponsored roaming relationships and direct bilateral agreements
- Investigate roaming registration failures, NRTRDE gaps, and steering/blocking issues
- Coordinate with partner NOCs on S6a/MAP/GTP incidents, including pcap exchange and joint root-cause analysis
- Participate in the weekly on-call rotation (1 week on, 10 weeks off)
- Respond to Opsgenie alerts — SMF overload, DRA peer down, HSS failures, GTP session rejects, charging errors
- Drive incident resolution end-to-end, coordinating across internal teams and external vendors
- Write post-incident summaries and feed learnings back into tooling and runbooks
- Use and extend our pcap analysis tooling and protocol decoders to speed up investigations
- Contribute configuration and automation for EPC infrastructure (Ansible, Kubernetes)
- Improve observability — Grafana dashboards, alerting rules, protocol-level metrics
- Where a fix or diagnostic needs a small code change, be comfortable making one — but this is an operations role, not a software-development one
- 3+ years operating or engineering telecom infrastructure — EPC, HSS/HLR, DRA, STP, PGW, SMF, or equivalent
- Strong understanding of mobile core signalling: Diameter (S6a, S6d, Gx), SS7/MAP/TCAP, GTPv2-C, GTP-U
- Comfort reading pcap traces — tshark/Wireshark protocol dissection, filtering by IMSI/AVP/transaction, protocol hierarchy analysis
- Solid Linux systems skills and comfort operating infrastructure via configuration/automation tooling (Ansible or equivalent)
- Comfort working in a vendor-managed environment — driving external partners and roaming NOCs to resolution without direct control
- Ability to read code and scripts well enough to follow a signalling path through a system
- Working knowledge of a scripting or programming language (Python, Elixir, Go, or similar) for tooling and diagnostics
- Experience with freeDiameter and custom AVP transforms
- Kubernetes and containerised EPC workloads
- Roaming agreement experience — NRTRDE, TAP, sponsored roaming models, ORS blacklists
- Multi-IMSI SIM applet knowledge and OTA provisioning
- Experience with etcd-based configuration distribution
- 3GPP standards familiarity (TS 29.272, 29.060, 29.244, 29.002) — enough to read specs when chasing a protocol-level issue
LI-KG1
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