Principal Customer Engineer, Openstack, Kubernetes

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Texas.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the technical relationship with a select group of strategic clients (generally 5–8), serving as their main technical contact within MOSK, MKE, k0rdent, and the extensive Mirantis portfolio.

• Develop an in-depth understanding of each client's architecture, use cases, internal platform strategy, and associated toolchain; maintain an up-to-date technical account plan for each.

• Enhance product integration by pinpointing opportunities to broaden Mirantis utilization across new workloads, clusters, environments, and teams — while collaborating with the client to eliminate technical obstacles.

• Facilitate technical alignment between the client's engineering and platform teams and Mirantis Product and Engineering; translate client requirements into actionable product feedback and convert roadmap insights into relevant guidance for the client.

• Conduct regular technical sessions — architecture evaluations, upgrade planning meetings, roadmap discussions, and health assessments — both virtually and on-site at client locations.

• Collaborate closely with Support on significant cases for your accounts, managing alert duties and urgent issues, providing account context, expediting resolution, and addressing recurring problems through product and operational enhancements.

• Internally advocate for the client across Product, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success; ensure their perspectives are reflected in roadmap, release, and prioritization discussions.

• Work alongside the account team — Technical Account Manager, Account Executive, and Solutions Engineer — without overlapping their responsibilities; the distinction is clear: they handle commercial, delivery, and pre-sales; you maintain ongoing technical expertise post-sale.

• Contribute to internal enablement, reference architectures, and best-practice guidance so that insights gained from one account benefit the broader customer community.

⛳️ Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role (Customer Engineer, Senior Consultant, Principal Support Engineer, SRE working directly with customers, or equivalent).

• Proven history of managing the technical relationship with large enterprise clients and driving increased adoption of a platform product.

• Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes operations — including cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, security, multi-cluster configurations, and production troubleshooting.

• Solid understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentals.

• Significant experience with OpenStack core services such as Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, and Glance.

• Practical knowledge of Neutron networking, including OVS and OVN, VLAN and VXLAN, and SDN concepts.

• Familiarity with Cinder storage backends, including Ceph RBD and LVM.

• Excellent proficiency in written and spoken English; capable of communicating effectively with both senior technical stakeholders and hands-on engineers.

• Willingness to travel to client sites as necessary (expected 20–30%).

🏝️ Benefits

• Join an established leader from Silicon Valley in the cloud infrastructure sector.

• Work alongside exceptionally passionate, skilled, and engaging colleagues, assisting Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients in implementing next-generation cloud technologies.

• Be part of innovative, cutting-edge open-source projects.

• Flourish in a dynamic environment of a young company that values openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth.

• Opportunities for professional development and training.

• Attend conferences and participate in working groups.

• Customized workstation options (macOS, Windows).

• A competitive compensation package that includes a robust benefits plan and stock options.