Principal OpenStack Engineer (Post-Sales)

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.