Principal Customer Engineer

Mirantis•Austin, TX

18h•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

7+ years in a customer-facing technical role (Technical Account Manager, 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.
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%).

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Own the technical relationship with a small number of strategic customers (typically 5–8), acting as their primary technical point of contact across 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, 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 — Customer Success Manager, 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.