Customer Success Engineer - Instaclustr
About The Position
Instaclustr, part of NetApp, helps enterprises run business-critical applications using managed open-source database, streaming, and search technologies. The Customer Success Engineer partners with strategic customers to solve complex technical challenges, guide large-scale migrations, and support the performance, reliability, and scale their businesses require. Working alongside a Customer Success Manager (CSM), the Customer Success Engineer leads technical customer engagement. The CSM owns the overall customer success plan, while this role provides technical expertise to understand customer applications and architectures, define requirements, guide infrastructure decisions, and help new workloads succeed in production. The role works directly with customer engineers, architects, and executives, and partners internally with Support, Product, and Engineering. It spans migration planning, performance-risk identification, and product-improvement input, contributing directly to customer outcomes.
Requirements
- Strong hands-on experience with Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, or OpenSearch, with deep expertise in at least one; ability to troubleshoot production issues and explain architecture, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
- Six or more years of relevant technical experience in customer success engineering, technical account management, solutions architecture, consulting, site reliability engineering, or a comparable role supporting complex platforms.
- Experience supporting enterprise customers with business-critical production environments and building credibility with engineers, architects, and executive stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, including scalability, availability, performance, capacity planning, and operational reliability.
- Experience with AWS, Google Cloud, and/or Microsoft Azure, including translating customer requirements into practical architecture and infrastructure recommendations.
- Experience guiding migrations, deployments, upgrades, or other significant technical changes, including assessing readiness and managing technical dependencies.
- Strong troubleshooting skills and technical judgment; comfort investigating ambiguous problems, asking thoughtful questions, and engaging the right experts.
- Ability to lead technical discussions and communicate clearly with technical practitioners and business leaders.
- Ability to manage competing priorities, coordinate cross-functional work, identify and mitigate technical risk, and drive commitments through completion.
- A proactive, customer-focused approach and enthusiasm for helping enterprises succeed with open-source technology.
- Willingness to travel and spend time onsite with customers as needed.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent relevant work experience.
Nice To Haves
- Advanced degree.
- Relevant technical certifications.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the trusted technical advisor for strategic customers by understanding their applications, architecture, operational priorities, and growth plans.
- Translate business objectives into technical requirements, including workload characteristics, performance targets, capacity needs, and measurable success criteria.
- Guide architecture and sizing recommendations with internal technical teams, helping customers make informed decisions about infrastructure, scalability, and reliability.
- Lead technical readiness planning for migrations, new workloads, deployments, upgrades, and infrastructure changes; identify prerequisites, dependencies, and risks.
- Assess customer environments for recurring issues, operational patterns, architectural concerns, and product gaps, and recommend improvements proactively.
- Coordinate complex technical escalations across Support, Product, Engineering, and customer teams, establishing ownership and driving resolution.
- Anticipate capacity needs related to workload growth, traffic events, regional expansion, and upcoming migrations.
- Identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and optimize cost while protecting performance, reliability, and future growth.
- Align customer technical roadmaps with Instaclustr capabilities and represent customer requirements in discussions with Product and Engineering.
- Maintain visibility across technical commitments and parallel workstreams, ensuring clear ownership, current status, and follow-through.
- Lead technical working sessions and contribute to customer business reviews by presenting environment health, accomplishments, emerging risks, and upcoming decisions.
- Partner with the CSM to connect technical execution with customer adoption, long-term value, and continued growth.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
