Enterprise Technical Advisor

Job Title- Enterprise Technical Advisor

Location- America (North and South America only) Remote- Candidates must have the required visa and permits to work in these locations

Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise Private Clouds. Founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers, we are dedicated to transforming IT operations. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns your existing hardware into a full-featured, future-ready private cloud. We innovate across what we build and how we deliver it, staying focused on a next-generation, open private cloud while holding ourselves to one standard: exceptional customer outcomes.

Enterprises are selecting Platform9 to replace legacy virtualization because it eliminates operational risk and complexity. Private Cloud Director is designed for the experienced infrastructure team, offering a familiar GUI experience for managing VMs and containers, seamless integration with your existing hardware and third-party storage, and critical enterprise features (HA/DR, scale, reliability) built-in. This enables IT teams to gain robust API control and a user experience they trust, rooted in customer obsession and an owner's mindset. We share context quickly and candidly to keep decisions moving.

With over 30,000 nodes in production at some of the world's largest enterprises, including Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace, Platform9 is the proven path to achieving true vendor independence and operational consistency. We are an inclusive, globally distributed company backed by prominent investors, supported by a partner ecosystem of resellers, systems integrators, MSPs, and technology vendors committed to driving private cloud innovation and efficiency. Our values of innovation, customer obsession, ownership, radical candor, and excellence guide how we build and support every deployment.

Job Summary

As an Enterprise Technical Advisor (ETA) at Platform9, you act as the trusted advisor to our Premium Support customers, proactively guiding them to get the most out of Platform9 and holding yourself accountable for their success across their journey with us. You combine strong technical depth with customer success and account management skills to deliver Personalized, Proactive, Preventative, and Reactive enterprise-class services across Platform9 Private Cloud Director.

You become deeply familiar with each customer's business goals, technical requirements, architecture, operational practices, and journey stage. You connect customer needs to Platform9 capabilities and best practices, develop Power Users and Champions, drive product adoption and workload placement, coordinate escalations and root cause analysis, and ensure customer Decision Makers see the value Platform9 delivers. You work closely with internal cross-functional teams (Support, SRE, Engineering, Product, Sales, and Services) and pull in subject matter experts (SMEs) when deeper expertise is needed.

 

Essential Functions

Enterprise Technical Advisors deliver across three areas of responsibility:

Trusted Advisor

• Serve as the primary trusted technical advisor for a portfolio of Premium Support customers, connecting their needs to Platform9 capabilities and best practices.
• Be an active, hands-on user of the platform to showcase new release capabilities and ecosystem integrations.
• Proactively review customer environments and usage to identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
• Run customer training sessions and workshops and drive the change management that expands product usage and workload placement.
• Gather customer requirements and identify product gaps; file and track product feature requests, and work with SMEs on documented workarounds (CLI usage, custom configurations, scripting) where capabilities are technically possible but not yet productized.
• Create knowledge base articles and documentation for customer and internal awareness.
• Coordinate and drive resolution of critical technical issues and escalations.

Customer Success

• Map and manage customer success plans that align Platform9 usage with customer business outcomes across the customer journey: Onboarding, Adoption, Expansion, and Renewal.
• Lead customer meetings and recurring communication, capturing meeting minutes and delivering customer moments of impact.
• Lead Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) to align decision makers and champions on value realization and business priorities.
• Maintain customer documentation and journey status so we Know Your Customer (KYC), with up-to-date reporting on customer health and journey state.
• Escalate to leadership when needed to deliver on Platform9's promise of being the most trusted name in private cloud.
• Enhance moments-of-impact playbooks and the systems behind how we work.
• Develop referenceable customers for case studies and sales references.

Project Management

• Track and prioritize customer-related deliverables, setting clear expectations and reflecting each customer's urgency and business impact.
• Drive customer-related action items, feature requests, documentation, and training to completion for an equitable customer relationship.
• Deliver post-incident root cause analysis and track corrective action items to completion.

 

Job Requirements

Core skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences and to engage executive stakeholders.
• Strong interpersonal skills and a customer-success mindset; ability to build trust with customer stakeholders and collaborate effectively across internal teams.
• Account management and customer success experience; comfortable owning success plans, driving action plans and timelines, and delivering executive-ready updates and business reviews.
• Change management and enablement skills: developing Power Users and Champions and driving adoption and workload placement.
• Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and applying them in customer-facing environments.
• Creative, structured approach to problem solving; strong troubleshooting instincts and escalation leadership.

Technical knowledge (in-depth knowledge in three or more areas is essential)

• Linux systems administration (Ubuntu/RHEL), including troubleshooting systemd, networking, storage, performance, and logs.
• Kubernetes and cloud-native operations (clusters, CNI/CSI concepts, core components, upgrades, RBAC, and troubleshooting workloads).
• OpenStack and/or private cloud infrastructure (compute, networking, and storage concepts; HA/availability patterns; and operational troubleshooting).
• Virtualization technologies (KVM/QEMU/libvirt; familiarity with VMware environments and migration considerations is a plus).
• Networking (TCP/IP, routing/switching fundamentals, VLANs, MTU/jumbo frames, LACP/bonding, DNS/DHCP; familiarity with overlays like VXLAN/EVPN is a plus).
• Storage/infrastructure integrations (Ceph concepts, iSCSI/NFS fundamentals, CSI drivers, storage performance and latency troubleshooting).
• Automation/Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible, Git-based workflows, scripting with Bash/Python).
• Observability and troubleshooting (metrics/logs/traces basics; Prometheus/Grafana/ELK-style stacks familiarity; packet capture basics).

Operational expectations

• Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices (change management, incident handling, postmortems, documentation).
• Travel to customer domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.
• Availability to coordinate and respond to critical customer escalations per policy.

Responsibility and Interaction

Responsibility

• Accountable for the success and outcomes of a portfolio of Premium Support customers. Applies experience and judgment to solve routine to moderately complex problems and to drive cross-team outcomes for escalations, adoption, and value realization.

Interaction

• Works with customer technical and executive stakeholders (Admin/Engineering/Operations and Decision Makers) and internal teams ranging from Staff to Executive leadership.
• Receives general direction on routine work and detailed direction on new projects/assignments; participates in ongoing prioritization and activity review.
• Expected to be a key contributor and, at times, a lead on team initiatives that improve customer outcomes and operational excellence.

Education and Experience

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience is required. Prior experience as a Technical Account Manager, Customer Success Manager, Solutions Architect, Technical Support/Escalations Engineer, SRE/DevOps Engineer, Systems Engineer, and/or Project/Program Manager is preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Industry certifications are a plus, such as CKA/CKAD, RHCE, CCNA/CCNP, OpenStack-related certifications, cloud provider certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP), or comparable credentials.