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.

Title: Sr. Escalation Engineer – Client 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.

This is a dream job for an individual who likes to develop and maintain proficiency across a wide variety of enterprise-class hardware and software products. 

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

• 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

• Serve as a Thales product support expert who will work closely with other department 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:

• Operating Systems & Infrastructure
  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)
  Load balancer concepts

• Database Knowledge
  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

• Security & Compliance Fundamentals
  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.

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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. Read more about our benefits here.

We are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued for who they are and the unique strengths they bring. Discover more about our programmes, employee networks, wellbeing policies, and inclusive features here.

If this role isn’t quite right for you, we encourage you to join our talent community where your details will be shared with our recruitment teams for other potential opportunities. Join the Talent Community here.

Join Thales in the UK – Innovate with us and shape the future!