Senior Customer Deployment Engineer

Life at Valarian

Additional information

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with OpenShift or Kubernetes in on-premise, bare-metal, restricted, or air-gapped environments.
• Experience delivering software in regulated, sovereign, government, defence, or other security-critical settings.
• Familiarity with Terraform, Ansible, Argo CD, or comparable infrastructure and configuration tools.
• Experience with monitoring, secrets management, distributed storage, or Kubernetes networking.
• Experience improving installation tooling, writing operational documentation, or delivering customer training.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer installations from initial technical discovery and readiness assessment through deployment, validation, and handover.
• Gather high-level requirements, including intended workloads, infrastructure constraints, integrations, security requirements, availability expectations, and acceptance criteria.
• Work with customer infrastructure and security teams to establish prerequisites across cluster capacity, networking, DNS, certificates, storage, identity, and access.
• Install and configure ACRA using the Wizard and supported deployment workflows across cloud, on-premise, and customer-managed environments.
• Act as the primary technical contact during delivery, build trusted customer relationships, and communicate progress, blockers, responsibilities, and next steps clearly.
• Plan and execute ACRA upgrades, including compatibility checks, maintenance windows, backups, recovery procedures, and post-upgrade validation.
• Help customers plan and carry out Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster upgrades, coordinating changes with the teams responsible for the underlying infrastructure.
• Help configure, test, and improve supported unattended installation and upgrade workflows, including health checks, failure detection, and recovery.
• Troubleshoot installation and live deployment issues across Kubernetes, Linux, networking, storage, and application dependencies; work with engineering to resolve product defects.
• Validate agreed customer workflows and operational readiness before completing deployment or upgrade handover.
• Maintain deployment records, installation guides, and runbooks; train customer operators and provide agreed support after go-live.
• Turn recurring deployment problems and customer feedback into clear improvements to ACRA, the Onboarding Wizard, automation, and documentation.
• What we are looking for:
• Strong hands-on experience deploying, troubleshooting, and operating production software on Kubernetes.
• Practical Linux knowledge and a good understanding of networking, DNS, TLS, persistent storage, containers, and access controls.
• Experience delivering production upgrades and handling failed changes, including backup, recovery, and service validation.
• Familiarity with Helm, GitOps, and infrastructure or deployment automation.
• Experience working directly with customers or external technical stakeholders, gathering requirements and managing delivery expectations.
• Clear communication skills: you can explain an issue to an infrastructure engineer and give a concise, useful update to a customer stakeholder.
• Strong operational judgement: you know when to proceed, investigate further, pause a change, or escalate.
• Ability to take ownership of a deployment while working effectively with customer teams and engineering specialists.
• Ability to write useful scripts or small tools in Bash, Python, or a similar language.
• Willingness to work onsite with customers, travel as required, and support agreed maintenance windows.
• Your background could be in field engineering, professional services, technical implementation, infrastructure engineering, SRE, or technical support with substantial deployment responsibility. We care about evidence of successful delivery and sound judgement.