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 st

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