Senior Principal Software Engineer - 5G Core Networks

Senior Principal Software EngineerApplied Signal Technology (AST) is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer with specialization in protocol development within 5G Core Networks who strives for excellence and has a passion to be part of a team that strengthens our nation and improves the security of our world.This is an ONSITE position at the San Jose, CA location.What You Will Do:Apply your 5G Core Network software development experience to advance our next generation mobile telecommunication processing solutions by:Collaborating with technical leaders to further product visions and roadmaps and developing innovative software solutions,Collaborating with customers to elicit requirements and CONOPS, andPerforming technical research, developing technical documentation, presentations, and/or leading concept demonstrations.Travel up to 15% travel time to other AST sites and customer sites to support customers meetings and/or demonstrations, system deployments.Qualifications You Must Have:Typically requires a degree in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) and a minimum of 10 years of prior relevant experienceAggregate of 7 years software development experience in one or more of the following areas:Developing 3GPP network functions, network interfaces, and/or service-based interfaces, such as:User Plane Function (UPF), Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), and/or Session Management Function (SMF)N4 and/or N11 network interfaces, and/orNamf, Nsmf, and/or Nupf services.Developing protocols such as NAS, PFCP, GTP-U, and/or engineering telecommunications protocols.Troubleshooting distributed systems and control-plane signaling paths.Using 5G core network control-plane probes.Developing service-based microservices with REST-like APIs.Demonstrated expertise developing Linux-based software systems utilizing modern C++, Python, or equivalent environments to architect, implement, and validate complex telecommunications processing solutions.Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government issued Top Secret SCI (TS/SCI) security clearance with polygraph after start.U.S. citizenship is required, as only U.S. citizens are eligible for a security clearance.Qualifications We Prefer:Existing U.S. government issued TS/SCI security clearance with polygraph or current SSBI.Knowledge of AMF, SMF, UPF, UDM, PCF, AUSF, NRF behavior, interactions, and call flows.Experience developing 5G core network control-plane probes for monitoring network traffic, extracting signaling and user-plane information, decoding 3GPP protocols, and/or traffic replay.Experience with observability frameworks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)Familiarity with 4G EPC (MME, SGW, PGW, HSS).Familiarity with network virtualization and/or containerization technologies (KVM, VMware, OpenStack, AWS, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker).Experience developing with Go or Rust.