Principal Customer Engineer (Openstack, Kubernetes)
HybridAustin, Texas, United States
Job Summary
Own the technical relationship with 5–8 strategic customers as their primary point of contact across MOSK, MKE, k0rdent, and the broader portfolio. Build deep knowledge of each client's architecture, use cases, and platform strategy to maintain a living technical account plan. Drive product integration by removing technical blockers and expanding Mirantis usage into new workloads and teams. Lead technical alignment between customer engineering and Mirantis Product, translating requirements into product input and guiding roadmap discussions. Run regular cadences including architecture reviews, upgrade planning, and health checks remotely and on-site. Partner with Support on high-impact cases, alerting duties, and hush severity issues to accelerate resolution and close loops on recurring problems. Advocate internally for the customer across Product, Engineering, and Support to ensure their voice shapes release prioritization. Contribute back to internal enablement, reference architectures, and best-practice guidance to benefit the wider customer base.
Required Qualifications
- 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%)
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with MKE, k0rdent, OpenStack, or comparable enterprise container and private-cloud platforms
- Familiarity with the cloud-native ecosystem: Helm, GitOps (Argo CD, Flux), observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki), and service mesh
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, Cluster API)
- Exposure to enterprise security and compliance contexts (FedRAMP, PCI, regulated industries)
- Prior experience operating alongside channel and GSI partners on joint accounts
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