Senior Customer Deployment Engineer

Valarian Technologies is a dual-use technology company building critical tools to safeguard the future in an era of evolving global security challenges. We're rethinking security beyond traditional military domains, addressing asymmetric threats that impact our technological advantage, economic strength, and democratic institutions.   We build Acra – the platform foundation for everything we do as a dual-use technology company. The platform’s name, rooted in the Greek word for citadel (or, fortress), reflects the design and purpose of our infrastructure-agnostic secure enclaves: protecting critical data. Some of the government and commercial workflows include: increased operational resiliency for mission-critical systems and functions; enabling organisations to more quickly and widely adopt emerging technologies while ensuring the integrity of their intellectual property; information flow during disaster response scenarios, and zero-trust / least-privilege environments for M&A, attorney-client privileged communications, etc. And we’ve only scratched the surface.   At our core, we're driven by a shared mission and a belief in making a tangible impact on our world. Whether you join our London HQ or the wider global organisation, you’ll be a part of collaborative, high-performing teams, creating cutting-edge software, platforms, and infrastructure. The Role  We are looking for a Senior Customer Deployment Engineer to lead the installation, upgrade, and operational delivery of ACRA in customer environments.   You will work directly with customers, onsite and remotely, to understand their requirements, prepare their infrastructure, install ACRA through our Onboarding Wizard, and guide deployments through validation and operational handover. You will also help maintain live deployments, deliver upgrades, and work with engineering to make unattended installation and upgrade workflows more reliable.   This role combines practical Kubernetes expertise with customer communication and delivery ownership. You should enjoy investigating technical problems, working alongside customer teams, and taking responsibility for getting a deployment working in the environment where it will actually be used.   You will work closely with Valarian’s infrastructure, platform, product, and engineering teams. Your experience in the field will help shape our installation tooling, documentation, and deployment workflows, making each deployment more repeatable and easier to operate. Success means customers have a working platform they can confidently use and maintain, with clear operating procedures and a dependable relationship with Valarian. What you’ll do: 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. Nice to have 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.   Benefits:   Our benefits are designed to ensure our employees feel taken care of and are proud to be a part of the Valarian team. We are committed to consistently enhancing our benefit package, taking into account the overall well-being and needs of our teammates. Here are the key benefits accessible to all employees at Valarian Technologies:   Equity – because you have the right to own what you’re building A competitive salary – because we value your unique skills Employer pension contributions – because you deserve a secure future Private health insurance - because your health is important to us Hybrid work setup – because everyone has different needs Gym memberships - because staying active fuels productivity Rewarding company retreats and meetups that respect your work/life balance – because we love getting to know each other Life at Valarian Our culture is built on inclusivity, compassion and flexibility – we want everyone to be empowered to achieve their goals at Valarian.   The work we do is vital, but so are the connections that make it happen. We thrive on the shared energy, spontaneous conversations, and mutual trust built when we spend time together. We operate on a hybrid model, gathering in our London office 3 days a week to support one another and collaborate. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us. Valarian Technologies Limited is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran, amnesty, or any other legally protected characteristic.   We are committed to ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process and providing employment opportunities to all applicants. Decision recruitment, hiring, and employment are based solely on qualifications, skills, and experience relevant to the job requirements.