Principal Customer Engineer (Openstack, Kubernetes)

Principal Customer Engineer (Openstack, Kubernetes)

Mirantis is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy.

Job Description

The Principal Customer Engineer is a senior, customer-facing technical role within Customer Success, dedicated to a small portfolio of Mirantis's most strategic accounts. The focus of the role is to become the trusted technical partner inside each customer—understanding their platform, their roadmap, and their operational reality in depth, and using that understanding to drive deeper product integration, sharper technical alignment, and measurably better outcomes on Mirantis software. You will work alongside a Technical Account Manager and the wider account team, complementing their commercial and delivery remit with hands-on technical depth.

Main Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

Minimum 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%).

Preferred 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.

What Success Looks Like

• Measurable expansion of Mirantis footprint inside each named account—more clusters, more workloads, more teams.
• Customers describe Mirantis as technically aligned with their roadmap, and cite you by name as the reason.
• A steady flow of high-quality product input from the field into Mirantis Product and Engineering.
• Reduced escalation volume and faster time-to-resolution on accounts in the portfolio.

Additional Information

What does Mirantis offer you?

• 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.

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