Principal Customer Engineer – Openstack, Kubernetes

Role Overview

• Own the technical relationship with a small number of strategic customers (typically 5–8)
• 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%)

Tech Stack

• Kubernetes
• Linux
• OpenStack

Benefits

• Professional development and training
• Attend conferences and working groups
• Customized workstation (macOS, Windows)
• A competitive compensation package with strong benefits plan and stock options