Customer Success Engineer, Defence & Institutional (m/w/d)

You will own the post-award relationship with defence customers: procurement bodies, testing authorities, and institutional partners such as WTD and BAAINBw. This means managing projects from contract kickoff through acceptance testing and into operational use, while staying close enough to the hardware to answer technical questions without routing everything through engineering.

This is not a support role. You are the customer's primary technical and project point of contact at ZeroPhase, and you are accountable for the outcome.

What you'll do

• Own project delivery for institutional defence customers from kickoff to acceptance, managing timelines, milestones, and documentation to the standards these customers require.
• Lead technical reviews, status meetings, and acceptance testing sessions with procurement bodies and testing authorities.
• Translate customer requirements into clear internal briefs for engineering, and translate engineering output back into language customers can act on.
• Produce and maintain project documentation: test plans, acceptance protocols, interface control documents, delivery reports.
• Identify integration issues early and coordinate resolution across engineering and operations before they become customer problems.
• Build trusted relationships with customer-side project managers and technical leads over multi-year engagement cycles.
• Selectively travel to customer sites across Germany and Europe for testing campaigns, reviews, and workshops. For those who want it, exposure to operational environments including Ukraine is available.

What we’re looking for

• 3 to 6 years in a technical project management or customer-facing engineering role, ideally with defence, aerospace, or a similarly regulated customer base.
• Comfortable reading and writing formal project documentation: test plans, requirements specs, acceptance protocols.
• Enough technical depth to hold a credible conversation about RF communication systems, embedded hardware, or UAV integration without an engineer in the room.
• Familiar with how German or European defence procurement works: the patience, the process, and the relationships it requires.
• Precise communicator in both German and English.
• Organised and self-directed.

Bonus: not required

• Direct experience with WTD, BAAINBw, or comparable procurement authorities.
• Background in RF, communications, or datalink systems.
• Military background.
• German security clearance or eligibility for one.