Principal Customer Engineer, Openstack, Kubernetes
Job Description:
- Own the technical relationship with a small number of strategic customers (typically 5–8), acting as their primary technical point of contact across MOSK, MKE, k0rdent, and the broader Mirantis portfolio.
- Build a deep working knowledge of each customer’s architecture, use cases, internal platform strategy, and adjacent toolchain; maintain a living technical account plan for each.
- Drive deeper product integration by identifying opportunities to expand Mirantis usage into new workloads, clusters, environments, and teams — and by working with the customer to remove the technical blockers that stand in the way.
- Lead technical alignment between the customer’s engineering and platform teams and Mirantis Product and Engineering; translate customer requirements into credible product input and translate roadmap into customer-relevant guidance.
- Run regular technical cadences — architecture reviews, upgrade planning sessions, roadmap briefings, and health checks — both remotely and on-site at customer locations.
- Partner closely with Support on high-impact cases for your accounts, alerting duties and hush severity issues, providing account context, accelerating resolution, and closing the loop on recurring issues through product and operational improvements.
- Advocate internally for the customer across Product, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success; ensure their voice is represented in roadmap, release, and prioritisation discussions.
- Collaborate with the account team — Technical Account Manager, Account Executive, and Solutions Engineer — without duplicating their remit; the boundary is clear: they own commercial, delivery, and pre-sales; you own sustained technical depth post-sale.
- Contribute back to internal enablement, reference architectures, and best-practice guidance so patterns learned in one account benefit the wider customer base.
Requirements:
- 7+ years in a customer-facing technical role (Customer Engineer, Senior Consultant, Principal Support Engineer, SRE embedded with customers, or equivalent).
- Demonstrable track record of owning the technical relationship with large enterprise customers and driving expanded adoption of a platform product.
- Expert-level Kubernetes operating knowledge — cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, security, multi-cluster patterns, and production troubleshooting.
- Strong Linux systems and networking fundamentals.
- Strong experience with OpenStack core services including Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, and Glance.
- Hands-on knowledge of Neutron networking, including OVS and OVN, VLAN and VXLAN, and SDN concepts.
- Experience with Cinder storage backends , including Ceph RBD and LVM.
- Excellent written and spoken English; able to communicate credibly with both senior technical stakeholders and hands-on engineers.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites as required (expected 20–30%).
Benefits:
- Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry.
- Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies.
- Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation.
- Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued.
- Professional development and training.
- Attend conferences and working groups.
- Customized workstation (macOS, Windows).
- A competitive compensation package with strong benefits plan and stock options.