
Senior Professional Services Engineer - OX App Suite (m/f/d)
Key Skills
Job Description
Our mission:
Are you an engineer with real technical depth AND do you want to own the relationship with one of our major hosting customer? Working through real production problems, translating operational needs into product improvements, and filling a role that matters to both sides? This combination is rare.At Open-Xchange (OX), we develop open-source communication and collaboration software used by public sector organizations, telcos, and hosting providers to keep data secure and under their control. Our products cover email, collaboration, DNS security, and related services, and are used by millions of people worldwide.
Discover what OX offers you:
- We work in a non-hierarchical organization that empowers everyone to take responsibility, stay focused, and contribute directly to the company’s success and customer value.
- We value expertise and continuous professional development. Our professionals work closely with experienced colleagues, take ownership of their work, and continuously expand their skills.
- Openness and diversity are core to OX. Different perspectives, backgrounds, and ways of thinking strengthen our collaboration and help us see the bigger picture.
Your team:
You'll work in a dedicated cell built around one of our largest hosting customers - a provider running multiple brands on OX App Suite 8. Your closest collaborators are the Account Manager and Development Engineers, with Support looped in as needed. It's a largely independent seat, but you're one of several engineers across the company running the same model for other large accounts.Your new job:
- Be present in the customer relationship - regular calls, occasional on-site visits, and persistent continuity that the customer's technical teams know you by name and trust your word.
- Build reference labs and generate reference configurations from them.
- Participate in OX-internal development of those frameworks.
- Analyze and resolve technical issues across the OX App Suite 8 stack. As L1/L2 is sitting with our customer your role is escalation-facing (L2/L3) taking ownership from escalation through to resolution and keeping the customer informed throughout.
- Translate customer feature requests and operational requirements into clear input for internal product and development teams, and feedback internal constraints to the customer in terms they can act on.
- Support the customer through upgrades, configuration changes, and new feature rollouts. Document solutions, workarounds, and deployment specifics - both for the customer and internally - and leave things better documented than you found them.
Formal on-call is not part of this role. - A typical day mixes customer and internal calls, hands-on lab and reference-configuration work, and technical documentation - with occasional escalation support when a customer integration needs deeper troubleshooting.
- Limited travel is required for customer-facing meetings (~1-2 per quarter) and company-internal meetings (~1 per quarter).
This is the tech stack you'll be working with:
Scale 1-5 where 5 means “hands-on depth expected on day one” and 1 means “we expect nothing and train it on the job”:- OX App Suite 8 | 1 |
- Kubernetes (Helm-based deployments) | 5 |
- Mail infrastructure: Dovecot (CE / Pro), Postfix, IMAP/SMTP) | 2 |
- Data layer: MariaDB, Redis | 3 |
- Storage: Object storage (S3-compatible), Rook Ceph | 2 |
- Identity: Keycloak, LDAP | 2 |
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana (or comparable stack) | 3 |
- Tooling: Linux, Bash/Python, kubectl, Helm | 5 |
- Networking: Istio (operational awareness, not configuration ownership) | 2 |
Your background:
- Proven ability to hold your ground in a technical disagreement with a customer or partner, and to stay composed and credible when a large account escalates - you can point to specific situations where you did this.
- Solid hands-on experience with Linux-based server environments.
- Working knowledge of several core stack components -
- mail infrastructure (IMAP/SMTP, Dovecot or equivalent).
- relational databases (MariaDB/MySQL).
- containerized deployments on Kubernetes.
- Familiarity with monitoring and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent) is part of staying ahead of issues rather than just reacting to them.
- We don't expect OX App Suite or Dovecot experience, we train it.
- Practical experience troubleshooting distributed systems in production: reading logs across multiple services, correlating symptoms, and working through problems with a clear method.
- Comfortable writing scripts to automate operational tasks or reproduce issues.
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role - support engineering, professional services, or similar - where you have taken ownership of an issue or requirement from first contact through to resolution.
- Familiarity with Helm-based deployments and the operational patterns that come with running multi-brand or multi-tenant hosting environments.
- Able to work across teams and communicate technical details to people with different backgrounds: you can represent a customer's operational reality in an internal engineering discussion and translate an internal constraint back to the customer without losing either side.
- Clear written communication is a requirement. Documentation and knowledge transfer are part of the job.
- Good written and spoken English is required as is fluency in German for this particular customer relationship.
This is what you get at OX:
- The flexibility to work 100% remotely ensures a work environment that suits you best.
- Flexible working hours that allow you to successfully combine your home and family responsibilities with work.
- Getting together in-person for workshops and fun team events.
- Time off to volunteer – and mental health support when you need it.
- We provide financial relief through corporate benefits and a subsidy for ergonomic chairs and desks.
- We can discuss further location-related benefits together in an initial talk.
Join the team:
Your contact person:
Core Responsibilities
You will act as the primary technical point of contact for a major hosting customer, managing escalations and translating operational needs into product improvements. Additionally, you will build reference labs, document solutions, and support the customer through upgrades and new feature rollouts.
Requirements
The role requires solid hands-on experience with Linux-based server environments, containerized deployments on Kubernetes, and troubleshooting distributed systems. Strong communication skills in both English and German are essential for managing customer relationships and internal cross-team collaboration.
Benefits
- Flexible working hours
- Remote work
- Mental health support
- Volunteer time off
- Corporate benefits
- Ergonomic equipment subsidy
About Open-Xchange
Industry: Software Development
Company size: 201-500 employees
Open-Xchange (OX) is a market leader of secure, open communication and office productivity software, email server software and DNS solutions, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. As the leading independent email provider, we work with some of the world’s largest hosters, telcos and ISPs (including partners such as IONOS, KPN, Orange, Italiaonline, NTT, Softbank and TalkTalk), as well as public sector organizations. Our roots in open source have shaped our view of the world and culture – open, diverse, and with a bias to act, giving everyone at OX room to take responsibility within their team and grow. As a company, we believe in an internet that is open, safe and free, and create competitive products that allow our customers to deliver secure internet services with great user experience, and that respect privacy and generate value. With 230+ people worldwide, OX develops and operates open source software (aaS) for mail/messaging and collaboration/productivity. Dovecot is the world’s most popular IMAP server software, and PowerDNS provides secure DNS services to our customers and their users. Our business is fast-paced and changing constantly. We are always looking for people who share our vision, who want to make a difference, thrive in agile, non-hierarchical environments, and enjoy working in a high-tech environment as part of a truly international team. OX is headquartered in Cologne, Germany, with further offices in Hamburg, Nuremberg and Olpe), in addition to the USA (Palo Alto, CA, and New York, NY), Finland (Espoo), The Netherlands (The Hague), Italy (Turin), and Japan (Tokyo). If you're interested in joining OX, please visit: https://ox.io/careers