VP of Delivery

About Akka

Akka builds the platform that enterprises use to develop, deploy, and operate agentic AI systems. Our customers run mission-critical workloads on top of Akka — many of them in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, public sector, defense-adjacent) where the cost of an outage, a data leak, or a botched upgrade is measured in regulatory exposure, not just churn. They are not buying SaaS. They are buying a managed runtime they can stake their business on.

We extend resilience guarantees and 99.9999% availability commitments, and we deliver those through a hosted managed service.

The role

The VP of Delivery owns the end-to-end customer experience: proof of concepts, onboarding, production operations, reliability, support, and the human relationships that turn a first deployment into a long-term partnership. This is not a SaaS-style "customer success" role — it is a delivery leadership role for a high-reliability managed service. The person in this seat is accountable for whether our customers' agentic AI workloads stay up, stay secure, and stay aligned with the commitments we made to them.

What you'll own

• Customer outcomes. Every customer's production health, renewal posture, and reference-ability. You know the names of the top accounts, the state of their environments, and the next three things we owe them.
• Reliability as the customer experiences it. SLO commitments to customers, incident response, change management, and the operational rituals that keep customer workloads running. SRE owns platform reliability and Engineering owns building the product; you own how both land for the customer and you push hard on each when the customer experience requires it.
• The delivery org. customer engineers, TAMs, and the operations function that runs the managed service. You hire, develop, and hold the bar for the people who are physically in the room (or on the call) with our customers.
• Customer compliance enablement. Our customers run regulated workloads on Akka under many different regimes; you make sure our product and the way we deliver it actively help them maintain their own compliance posture. The CISO owns Akka's posture; you own translating it into evidence, behavior, and product feedback our customers can stand behind to their own auditors.
• The feedback loop into Product and Engineering. You are the highest-fidelity signal in the company about what our customers actually need next, and you make sure that signal lands.

What we're looking for:

Mindset (the part we care most about)

• You own the customer's success as if it were your own business.
• Customer-obsessed, not customer-pleasing. You will tell a customer "no" when "yes" would set them up to fail. You will tell us "we shipped them a problem" when we did.
• Operator's instinct. You are drawn to the dashboard, the runbook, the postmortem. You believe reliability is a product feature and you treat it like one.
• Orchestrating us internally for the customer’s best. You make sure we together, irrespective of formal organization, use our strengths to make the customer successful.
• Comfortable with regulated reality. You don't bristle at change advisory boards, evidence collection, or auditor questions. You see them as part of the job and you've made them efficient before.
• Bias toward systems over heroics. When something breaks twice, you fix the system, not just the incident. You build delivery orgs that don't depend on any one person being awake.
• Builder, not administrator. Akka is still small enough that the VP of Delivery writes the playbook, doesn't inherit it. You are energized by that, not daunted.

Experience (the part we'll flex on for the right mindset)

• Has run a high-reliability managed service — meaning real production workloads, real on-call, real SLAs with teeth — for regulated or security-sensitive customers. Pure multi-tenant SaaS experience is not the same thing and is not sufficient on its own.
• Background that includes time as an SRE, platform engineer, or solutions architect — not just management.
• Has led delivery, customer engineering, TAM, or managed-services orgs at a company selling to regulated enterprises (financial services, healthcare, public sector, critical infrastructure, or similar).
• Has worked across multiple compliance regimes that customers care about — SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, DORA, EU AI Act, or equivalents. We don't require deep expertise in any single one; we do require having operated in enough of them to know how delivery work shows up in a customer's audit and how our product helps or hurts their compliance.
• Has built and scaled a delivery organization through a stage transition (e.g., from founder-led delivery to a real org, or from one region to multi-region).
• Our platform integrates tightly with Kubernetes on all hyperscalers. It uses established technologies and complements those with our competence from distributed systems. (GCP, AWS, Azure, K8s, Go, Helm, Kustomize, Crossplane, Java, Scala, Akka Libraries)

Nice to have, not required

• Recent, hands-on exposure to AI / agentic systems in production. Our product is an AI runtime; the person leading delivery cannot be learning what an LLM is on the job. "Recent" means within the last ~18 months and on workloads you were accountable for, not workloads you read about.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or actor-model platforms.
• Exposure to data residency / international transfer regimes (GDPR, UK GDPR, Schrems II realities).

How we'll evaluate

We weigh mindset and approach above years-of-experience checkboxes. The interview loop is built to surface:

1. How you reason about reliability tradeoffs under regulatory constraint.
2. How you've actually handled a serious customer-facing incident — what you did, what you'd do differently, what you institutionalized afterward.
3. How you think about AI-specific operational risks (model behavior drift, prompt/tool misuse, data leakage through agents) and how those should show up in a delivery org.
4. How you build and manage a team that holds a hard line on quality without becoming the team customers route around.

A candidate with ten years of SaaS customer success and no managed-service or AI exposure is not a fit for this seat, regardless of title progression. A candidate with seven years of managed-services delivery in regulated industries and twelve months of serious agentic-AI work probably is.

Logistics

• Location: Remote – US, Canada, European-based
• Compensation: Base + variable + equity
• Travel: Expect meaningful customer-site travel, especially in the first year.
• Start: This is an immediate need. Once found, the right person will start asap.

What We Offer

• A transparent, distributed work environment with a strong focus on work-life balance.
• Challenging work that interacts with innovative applications used by millions.
• A collaborative culture that attracts the "brightest minds" in the technology community.

Our Core Values:

• We’re Authentic: We value transparency and genuine communication, without politics or games. We're honest and assume good intentions, cultivating trust and accountability within our organization and in our interactions with others outside of Lightbend.
• We’re Customer-Focused: We value customer outcomes above all else. By prioritizing our customers' interests, and meeting them where they are today, we help ensure their success. We are dedicated to deeply understanding our customer’s needs, anticipating challenges, navigating time constraints and striving to exceed expectations.
• We’re Nonconventional: We value fearless innovation by challenging the status quo and embracing alternative approaches. Continuous learning and a growth mindset aimed at improving ourselves, our company, and our products, drives us to push boundaries and explore new solutions. Guided by a bias for action, we leverage industry and customer insights to inspire fresh ideas, enabling optimal future offerings.
• We’re Persistent: We value excellence through continuous experimentation and courageous problem-solving. We recognize that achieving success often demands approaching challenges with tenacity and taking calculated risks to achieve leading-edge solutions.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

Akka is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, welcoming individuals from all backgrounds and experiences. We celebrate differences and provide equal opportunities for all employees.