Lead Delivery Engineer

Open Innovation AI; Abu Dhabi Emirate; On-site; AED 300,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Open Innovation AI is seeking a Lead Delivery Engineer to drive end‑to‑end customer deployments on current‑generation AI infrastructure in the UAE. You will coordinate installers, storage engineers, and network teams, while hands‑on building the platform, configuring Kubernetes, and deploying Open Innovation products.

You will produce LLDs and as‑built docs, serve as the senior technical escalation contact, mentor field engineers, and shape deployment standards.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience deploying complex enterprise infrastructure.
• Proven experience leading mixed on-site teams during live builds.
• Deep production experience operating Kubernetes on bare metal and related operators.
• Strong Linux server administration and OS provisioning skills.
• Fluent English written and spoken.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer deployments on site from end to end, coordinating installers, storage engineers, and network teams.
• Hands-on platform deployment: OS provisioning, Kubernetes on bare metal, operators, and product deployment.
• Produce low-level designs (LLDs) and as-built documentation for engagements.
• Serve as senior technical escalation point for delivery engagements.
• Manage customer expectations and ensure alignment with delivery standards.

Skills

Kubernetes on bare metal

Linux server administration

Datacenter hardware fluency

Storage concepts (CSI)

On-site deployment coordination

Customer-facing communication

English fluency

Tools

Kubernetes

NVIDIA GPU Operator

NVIDIA Network Operator

Storage CSI drivers

Job description

Open Innovation AI is a global technology company that specializes in developing advanced solutions for managing AI workloads. Its flagship product, the Open Innovation Cluster Manager (OICM), orchestrates complex AI tasks efficiently across diverse infrastructures. The platform is hardware-agnostic, optimized for various GPUs and accelerators hardware, and facilitates seamless integration and scalability for enterprise AI applications. Open Innovation AI focuses on optimizing and simplifying AI workload management and making AI technologies accessible to organizations of all sizes. With its innovative solutions, companies can reduce operational costs, accelerate time to value, and maximize their return on investment, ensuring that their AI strategies contribute directly to enhanced business outcomes.

Role Overview:

The Lead Delivery Engineer is the senior technical authority for our Delivery Engineering team, the team that takes customer deployments from an empty data hall to a fully running platform on current‑generation AI infrastructure: NVIDIA HGX GPU servers, high‑speed networking, enterprise storage, and the Open Innovation platform on top. You lead each deployment on site, from end to end.

The physical build is handled by others: contracted installers do the rack‑and‑stack, cabling, and labeling, vendor field engineers commission the storage, and our Network Engineering team brings up the fabric. Through that phase you run the floor, making sure the work goes exactly to plan, coordinating the moving parts, and keeping the customer and the coordinator updated. Once the hardware is ready, the platform work is hands‑on and yours: provisioning and configuring operating systems, standing up Kubernetes, and deploying the Open Innovation products. You also produce the low‑level designs (LLDs) and the as‑built documentation for each engagement.

This is a senior individual contributor role. The authority you carry comes from your technical credibility, your judgment, and the trust you earn with the team and with customers. The team will look to you for the difficult technical calls, customers will treat you as their senior point of contact, and the deployment standards you define become the standards the team operates against. You will work closely with the Delivery & Network Coordinator on logistics and status, and with the Solutions Architects on pre‑sales technical feasibility.

You will spend significant time on customer sites, in escalation calls, and in deployment reviews, hands‑on and close to the work the team is doing. The expectation is that you can step into any deployment, find the problem, and either fix it yourself or direct the engineer who can. As Open Innovation grows, the scope of this role grows with it: more engineers operating to your standards, more customers, and more influence over how the delivery organization is run.

Role Responsibilities:

• Lead each customer deployment on site from end to end. During the physical build, direct and coordinate the parties doing the work: contracted installers on rack‑and‑stack, cabling, and labeling, vendor field engineers on storage, and the Network Engineering team on the fabric, keeping everything to plan and on schedule.
• Once the hardware is in place, run the platform deployment hands‑on: provisioning and configuring operating systems, standing up Kubernetes on bare metal, installing in‑cluster operators (storage CSI drivers, NVIDIA GPU Operator, NVIDIA Network Operator, and similar), and deploying and validating the Open Innovation products through to a working handover to customer operations.
• Produce the low‑level designs (LLDs) and the as‑built documentation for each engagement.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for delivery engagements. Customers escalated to you; you escalated to the Head of Infrastructure only when truly necessary.
• Manage customer expectations on engagements and represent the team's technical perspective ensuring good outcomes. Distinguish clearly between requests we accept to make our customers successful and the smaller set of cases where the right answer is a careful technical conversation. Absorb this layer of customer engagement so delivery engineers can focus on execution.
• Be the senior technical presence customers rely on when a deployment gets complex, resolving issues on the ground and keeping the engagement on track before they need to reach the Head of Infrastructure.
• Define, document, and evolve deployment standards: runbooks, acceptance criteria, handoff checklists, post‑deployment validation procedures.
• Mentor and unblock delivery engineers in the field, joining their calls, reviewing their work, and stepping in when an issue exceeds their experience level.
• Lead post‑incident and post‑deployment reviews. Identify systemic gaps and drive corrective action.
• Partner with the Delivery & Network Coordinator on resourcing, scheduling and cross‑team handoffs, particularly with the application teams who follow infrastructure into customer sites for LLM and platform deployments.
• Partner with Solutions Architects on pre‑sales technical reviews, validating that what is being proposed is deliverable by the team.
• Travel to customer sites across the UAE, including remote and controlled environments, on short notice when escalations require senior on‑site presence

Required experience & Qualification

• 8+ years of hands‑on experience deploying complex enterprise infrastructure into customer environments.
• Proven experience leading and coordinating a mixed on‑site team through a live build (contracted installers, vendor field engineers, network engineers), keeping the work to plan and on schedule.
• Deep production experience operating Kubernetes on bare metal, including air‑gapped or restricted‑network deployments. You should be fluent installing and configuring common in‑cluster operators on a fresh cluster: storage CSI drivers, NVIDIA GPU Operator, NVIDIA Network Operator, and similar.
• Strong Linux server administration (RHEL/Ubuntu): comfortable provisioning operating systems on bare metal, troubleshooting at the OS, driver, and kernel level, and bringing a fresh server from a blank state to production ready.
• Solid datacenter hardware fluency: GPU‑class server hardware (NVIDIA HGX/SXM/PCIe), basic datacenter networking (L2/L3 fundamentals), and the practical experience to supervise contracted installers on rack‑and‑stack, cabling, and labeling work to a high quality standard.
• Working knowledge of enterprise storage concepts (block, object, CSI), enough to install drivers, validate, and coordinate with storage vendor field engineers, who handle most of the storage‑side work on our engagements. Deep storage expertise is not required.

Customer‑facing bar

• Outstanding customer maturity. You are comfortable being the senior voice from Open Innovation in front of demanding customers, and you consistently manage their expectations on scope, timing and risk without damaging the relationship.
• Strong communication skills in writing and in live conversation. You explain technical decisions clearly to non‑technical stakeholders, and you hold a difficult conversation calmly.
• A track record of being the steady, trusted presence on hard engagements, resolving issues with customers and with your own engineers before they need senior leadership involvement.
• Demonstrable track record owning customer escalations end‑to‑end, including the customer conversation around the technical resolution. Prepared to discuss specific examples in depth.

Other requirements

• Fluent written and spoken English.
• Willingness to travel to UAE customer sites, including remote and controlled environments, on short notice

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience deploying NVIDIA HGX or H100/H200‑class GPU systems.
• Production experience tuning the NVIDIA GPU Operator and NVIDIA Network Operator on real workloads.
• Hands‑on experience with Pure Storage, NetApp, or comparable enterprise storage platforms.

What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days

• You have personally walked at least one in‑flight customer deployment from current state to a clean handoff.
• The delivery team comes to you with technical questions instead of escalating them to the Head of Infrastructure.
• A first version of the deployment standards (runbook + acceptance checklist) is in circulation and being used by the team.
• Customers on at least one active engagement know you by name and consider you their technical point of contact