[Hiring] OSS & Automation Architect @AST SpaceMobile

Role Description

We are seeking an OSS & Automation Architect to serve as the technical bridge between AST's internal stakeholders and the AST OSS engineering team. This is a dual-facing role - outward toward internal business stakeholders and teams in Service Assurance, Service Delivery, and Service Enablement; and inward toward the OSS engineering team and other technical teams to translate what those stakeholders need into precise, buildable specifications.

You will work in close conjunction with the OSS SW Platform Architect, contributing to Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), Functional Requirements (FRs), and Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) that shape the AST OSS platform. Where the Platform Architect sets the technical direction, you own the requirements surface - ensuring the architecture reflects real operational needs and that the OSS platform team is never building on assumptions.

This role requires equal command of business process analysis and OSS/automation domain knowledge. You must be credible in discussion with business process owners and equally credible in a design session with a technical team.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the primary liaison for internal customers - Service Assurance, Service Delivery, Service Enablement, and adjacent teams - representing the OSS program on-site.
• Capture business processes, operational pain points, and automation opportunities with the depth needed for engineering hand-off.
• Translate business requirements into well-structured Functional Requirements (FRs) and Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs).
• Contribute requirements context and operational constraints to every major design decision.
• Define automation requirements for OSS workflows - fault management, performance management, configuration management, and partner on-boarding - translating manual operational processes into automation specs.
• Identify and design integration points between OSS and internal systems (ERP, CRM, Jira, custom tooling).
• Identify candidates for workflow automation, define governance rules, and specify the business logic that drives automated decisions.
• Participate in sprint reviews and architecture sessions with the OSS platform team and validate delivered functionality against acceptance requirements.
• Maintain documentation for all business processes, requirements decisions, and OSS capability mapping.
• Create and maintain a roadmap of automation opportunities ranked by operational impact.
• Proactively surface new automation and integration opportunities from ongoing stakeholder engagement, without waiting for formal project kick-offs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Telecommunications Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent professional experience.
• A minimum of 7+ years in solutions architecture, systems integration, or OSS/BSS architecture roles within the telecom industry.
• Deep working knowledge of OSS functions - fault management, service provisioning, performance management, service assurance - and how they integrate with downstream enterprise IT landscape.
• Hands-on experience with commercial OSS platforms (Ericsson OSSA, Nokia NSP, NetCracker, Amdocs, Rakuten Symphony or other).
• Experience with TM Forum Open APIs and the eTOM/TAM business process and application frameworks.
• Background in ITIL-aligned service management processes, particularly service assurance and incident management workflows.
• Experience with workflow and BPM tooling (Camunda, Airflow, ServiceNow, or equivalent) from a requirements or design perspective.
• Proven ability to elicit, structure, and deliver FRs and NFRs from business stakeholders in a form directly usable by an engineering team.
• Experience specifying workflow automation for telecom operations: trigger conditions, state machines, exception handling, and governance rules for automated decisions.
• Experience specifying integrations between OSS and adjacent systems (ERP, CRM) familiarity with REST APIs, event-driven integration, and data contract design.

Soft Skills

• Naturally translates between the language of operations ("we need to know when a handover fails") and the language of engineering ("define the fault event schema and notification SLA") without losing fidelity in either direction.
• Impose clarity on ambiguous stakeholder inputs - produce artefacts that leave no room for the technical team to guess at intent.
• Do not wait for requirements to be handed over - actively hunt for process gaps, automation opportunities, and misalignments before they become delivery problems.
• Skilled at maintaining productive working relationships with a team several time zones away.
• Requirements artefacts are exact, versioned, and traceable - consider edge cases and exception flows, not just happy paths.

Technology Stack

• RESTful APIs, AsyncAPI & event-driven messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ), TMF Open APIs, NETCONF/YANG, SNMP.
• Camunda, Apache Airflow or equivalent BPM tooling.
• TM Forum eTOM/TAM, TOGAF or ArchiMate (working knowledge).
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes (working familiarity).
• Git (for specification and configuration artefact management, working knowledge).
• Confluence, JIRA, C4, draw.io, Mermaid, PlantUML.

Physical Requirements

• Ability to work in a standard office or remote home-office environment and use a computer for extended periods.
• Ability to participate in occasional after-hours incident response actions.