Deployment & Service Operations Support Engineer

Location: ASTRA UTM, United Arab Emirates

Thales people architect solutions that are relied upon to deliver operational advantage at every decisive moment throughout the mission. Defence and armed forces customers rely on us to deliver the full range of defensive systems for land, sea, and air. From early warning, to threat neutralisation, our platforms cover all levels from very short-range systems, to extended protection across the entire battle-space including Airspace Mobility Solutions, Vehicles and Tactical Systems and Missile Defence, Optronics, and Radar.

Thales has built a presence in the United Arab Emirates for over 35 years, and today has over 300 employees. Thales in the UAE is part of our Middle East business that has 1,800 people across Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, KSA, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar and UAE. Together we delivered technology for the Dubai metro, the longest driverless metro network in the world and a fare collection system that processes up to 250,000 transactions per day. We make UAE a safer place by providing secure electronic payment solutions, cyber security systems and communications as well as security systems for Dubai International Airport and air traffic management and navigation systems for Abu Dhabi’s airport.

CONTEXT

Air Mobility Solutions is the World Leader in Air Traffic Management and offers efficient and innovative products and services from Air traffic Control systems, Navigations aids, surveillance systems and Unmanned Traffic Management.

ATC & Digital Engineering teams provide complete trustworthy Digital and on-cloud solutions portfolio to manage efficiently existing and emerging airspace mobility.

Digital solutions offer an Agile Scale framework adopting feature engineering for solution and product/component-based engineering for software.

Engineering Team are composed of: 

Product teams accountable for defining, development, testing and release of the products that meet customer needs,

Enabling team/extended project team: Composed of specialists at solution level supporting solution owner & teams, including architect, design authorities.

Deployment & Services Operations team (yours): accountable for the instantiation of the product release versions for concurrent projects and customers. The team addresses several product lines over a number of projects.
As the beholder of operations, it directly contributes to the solution by managing not only delivery activities but also deployment and service & operations activities.

MISSIONS

As Deployment & Service Operations Support Engineer, you will be accountable for operational and customer support service level objectives sustained attainment. Directly engaged in the operational phases of the solution with existing and new customers, as well as supporting high potential bids with demos, you will contribute to the AMS service model underpinning the products’ value proposition.

As part of the service operation activities, you will:

• Be a Level 2 support agent for customers, prospects and partners,
• Be an incident management and reactive support agent in the context of our SLAs,
• Administrate and operate delivered services, monitoring indicators to reach period objectives,
• In that context, build and continuously feed a knowledge database for internal use as well as customer self-service use,
• Contribute to the SLA management, working closely with all solutions and partners teams as necessary to ensure structural reliability of the overall solution,
• Gather customer feedback and follow-up on development of features dedicated to operational efficiency.

As part of the deployment activities, you will:

• Contribute to end-to-end validation in contexts representative of the customers’,
• Contribute to physical and software installation of systems with third parties and customers integrated technical teams, including push to production,
• Administrate the cluster of instances deployed for all customers worldwide,
• Contribute to the maintenance of the infrastructure, CI/CD and configuration components of the delivered services,
• For prospects in pre-sales phase, prepare demos and scenarios, teaming up with business developers to meet bid demands,
• Deliver integration framework for meaningful projects with strong local constraints, potentially involving quality assessment or even development and instantiation of software components.

The role sits in the context of a multi-national team, leveraging on the time zones-spanning footprint to optimize reactivity on operational matters. This incurs a strong

EXPERIENCE

Expertise in System and/or integration, testing and validation, test environments,

Expertise in System architectures, network management and administration,

Customer support, ticketing, incident management and service delivery,

Knowledge in SaaS Cloud technologies,

Proven ability to work in a multi-cultural environment and with a variety of international customers,

Experience in ATM and/or UTM is a plus.

COMPETENCES & EXPECTATIONS

Main competencies:

• System or software administrator engineer with keenness on cloud technologies,
• Experience with SW-based systems engineering and verification/validation,
• Experience with test specifications and requirements traceability, test automation and test environments using high-level language,
• A thorough knowledge of servers and networks administration: Machine/VM sizing, network configuration, VPN, remote deployment, SSH filesystem access,
• A good understanding of DevOps principles in the following technical environment: MS Azure, Linux VMs clusters, SaaS ELK, Kubernetes, Kafka + Zookeeper, Gitlab, REST APIs, Java,
• Fluent with ticketing workflows and service request handling,
• ITIL awareness (governing principles and service goals),
• Customer-facing experience,
• Can work autonomously as well as within an international, remotely located and multi-disciplinary team,
• Team player, transparency,
• Pro-active and result-oriented,
• Written and spoken English.

Expected competencies:

• Any qualification on MS Azure cloud (in priority) or other cloud service provider would be beneficial,
• Acquaintance with agile and scrum methodologies, software assurance,
• Background in Aviation domain, i.e. Air Traffic Management, Airlines/airports operations, and/or Drone operation, Drone traffic regulation, operational qualification and aeronautical regulations in general would be a substantial plus.

At Thales we provide CAREERS and not only jobs. With Thales employing 80,000 employees in 68 countries our mobility policy enables thousands of employees each year to develop their careers at home and abroad, in their existing areas of expertise or by branching out into new fields. Together we believe that embracing flexibility is a smarter way of working. Great journeys start here, apply now!