Sr. Escalation Engineer - Client Services

Location: BELFAST ARNOTT HOUSE, United Kingdom

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.

Base location: Belfast, Northern Ireland (Hybrid)

Special Position Requirements: Given the critical nature of the customer issues supported, some after-hours/weekend work will be required. Participation in the 24 x 7 telephone support Rota is mandatory for this position.

Position Summary: This is an exciting opportunity to join a growing Global Support Organization and provide World class Support for all Thales products. Thales is a leading global provider of data protection solutions with more than 40 years’ experience securing the world’s most sensitive information. Our customers—businesses, governments, and technology vendors with a broad range of challenges use Thales e-Security products and services to improve the security of applications that rely on encryption and digital signatures.

By protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information that flows through today’s traditional, virtualized, and cloud-based infrastructures, Thales helps organizations reduce risk, demonstrate compliance, enhance agility, and pursue strategic goals with greater confidence.

Position Scope: As a member of a collaborative Client Services team, the Escalation Engineer will provide product escalation support to the Client Services Tech support team, for specific product, in constructing complex customer deployments, analyzing for root causes, recommending remediation procedures or best practices and documenting test methods, processes and knowledge bases. In addition, this position is responsible for validating proper interoperability of Thales products with other third-party vendor software/Solutions. This is a multi-disciplined role; the successful candidate should be able to perform hardware/software setup in a variety of lab configurations. This will include various OS platforms, storage products, databases, file systems, security protection software, HA clustering software, etc. The candidate must be a strategic thinker, well organized and able to work within fast-paced engineering environments and is also expected via collaboration with the broader Technical Support, QA and Developer teams to drive continual improvements to our processes and methodologies, all with the goal of continually improving the product quality and customer experience.

Key Responsibilities and Tasks:

• Work closely with global support engineers on customer escalation issues to ensure timely resolution.
• Configure and duplicate the customer’s environment where necessary to replicate the issues for diagnosing.
• Identify the root causes and use this information to improve continuously within support & field service teams.
• Work closely with global development teams to diagnose issues and validating fixes.
• Serve as a Thales product support expert who will work closely with other departments as required to facilitate training on new product and features and maintaining a database of training videos for support review.
• Work closely with our engineering and product management teams to communicate customer needs, issues, and trends to successfully use Thales products.
• Identify and champion product enhancement requests as customer advocates.
• Create knowledge and support articles, webinars, white papers, and other materials that help customers use Thales products.
• Other duties as assigned.

Technical Knowledge/Skills & Experience Required:

Essential:

• Strong Linux & Windows Server administration skills.
• System performance analysis (CPU, memory, disk, processes, services).
• Log analysis and troubleshooting.
• Virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V).
• Basic cloud exposure (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, NAT, VPN concepts).
• Packet capture and analysis (Wireshark, tcpdump).
• Strong understanding of databases (Oracle, MSSQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2, MySQL).
• SQL query analysis and troubleshooting.
• Database performance fundamentals.
• Understanding of DB connectivity/authentication.
• Replication and HA concepts.
• Vulnerability and risk concepts.
• Encryption fundamentals.
• Compliance standards awareness (PCI-DSS, SOX, HIPAA, GDPR).
• Diagnostic Tools (Wireshark, tcpdump, curl/Postman, Fiddler, Splunk/Kibana basics, Database tracing tools).

Good to have:

• Basic scripting (Bash, Python, PowerShell, REST API fundamentals, JSON/XML parsing).
• Automation mindset for repetitive diagnostics.
• Basic Git familiarity.

Troubleshooting & Escalation Skills:

• Analytical & Troubleshooting skills.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
• Complex log correlation.
• Crisis Management.
• Reproducing customer issues in lab environments.
• Performance bottleneck identification.
• Clear technical documentation skills.
• Strong ownership and accountability mindset.
• Ability to independently lead P1/P0 customer escalations.
• Mentorship and enablement of Support teams.
• Trend analysis and recurrence prevention.
• Contribution to KBs, tooling, automation, and process improvements.
• Strong understanding of enterprise customer environments and deployment patterns.

Educational Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in computer science /engineering or technical field or equivalent experience.

Professional Attributes:

• Demonstrates the Thales Values: Focus on Customers, Perform through teaming, Innovate, decide and act quickly, Develop our people.
• Proactive - Develops practical solutions, takes ownership, has a ‘can do' rather than ‘won’t do’ approach.
• Technically curious – Regards technology problems as challenges.
• Teamwork - Connected to the business, communicates openly, shares information and knowledge, networks internally and externally, persuades rather than pushes, involves colleagues, respects colleagues.
• Creative – Connects the technical dots with a goal of building customer value.
• Responsive - Always reacts quickly and with a sense of urgency to requests, issues, e-mails or other events in a timely and flexible fashion.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the UK at the time of hire. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship or for assuming sponsorship of an employment visa now or in the future.

At Thales, we ensure equal opportunities, pay and working conditions for all. The benefits we offer include private medical insurance, buying or selling annual leave, cycle to work schemes, employee discounts, paid volunteering day, stocks and shares, annual bonus and much more depending on the role. We are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued for who they are and the unique strengths they bring.