Job Title- Senior Cloud Support Engineer (CSE)
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 a Senior Cloud Support Engineer at Platform9, you provide concentrated, account-focused technical support to our most critical enterprise customers as part of Business Critical Services. Acting as the dedicated support engineer for a set of premium accounts, you bring deep, multi-domain troubleshooting expertise to the issues that matter most: driving fast, durable resolution of complex L2/L3 cases, leading high-severity incident response, and supporting VM migration and workload-mobility efforts across OpenStack and Kubernetes environments.
This is the senior individual-contributor level in support. You own the hardest problems on our highest-stakes accounts, set the standard for root cause analysis, and mentor the broader support team, while partnering closely with Enterprise Technical Advisors (ETAs), Engineering, and Product. It is also a strong platform for engineers who want to grow toward Enterprise Technical Advisor or Solutions Architect roles over time.
Essential Functions
Senior Cloud Support Engineers work with Platform9 customers and internal teams by providing expertise in the following areas:
- Serve as the designated support engineer for a set of Business Critical (premium) accounts, owning the technical support experience and outcomes for those customers.
- Own and drive resolution of complex L2/L3 technical issues to fast, durable closure against premium SLAs, with strong case hygiene (repro steps, logs, timelines, customer impact, workaround status).
- Lead Sev1/Sev2 incident response, gathering diagnostics, scoping customer impact, coordinating cross-team resolution, and driving root cause analysis to completion.
- Troubleshoot VM migration and workload-mobility issues, including live-migration failures, volume detach/attach inconsistencies, and VMware-to-PCD (vJailbreak) edge cases; distinguish control-plane vs. data-plane behavior and API latency vs. backend execution.
- Execute the technical work of account "get-well" plans on at-risk accounts, driving open issues to closure against defined exit criteria.
- Support self-hosted upgrade and maintenance windows, including readiness checks and collaborative troubleshooting through the change window.
- Perform environment health checks and maintain account runbooks, RCAs, and knowledge base content.
- Surface recurring defects and workaround patterns into structured product feedback for Engineering and Product.
- Partner with Enterprise Technical Advisors on account context and priority, and co-deliver customer-facing technical reviews as needed.
- Mentor and uplevel L1-L3 Cloud Support Engineers, and set the standard for diagnostics and RCA quality across the team.
- Compile and deliver root cause analyses (symptoms, contributing factors, corrective actions, prevention), coordinating internally for completeness and clarity.
Job Requirements
Core skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong customer-service mindset and the ability to build trust under pressure on high-severity issues.
- Demonstrated ownership and autonomy on the most complex production escalations; escalation leadership.
- Experience mentoring or coaching less-experienced engineers.
- Creative, structured approach to problem solving with strong troubleshooting instincts.
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).
- VM migration and workload mobility (live migration, storage detach/attach, state reconciliation; VMware-to-PCD / vJailbreak experience 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).
- Americas business-hours coverage for assigned accounts, with after-hours on-call availability for critical customer issues (per rotation/policy).
- Travel to customer domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.
Responsibility and Interaction
Responsibility
- Owns the most complex support outcomes on high-stakes accounts, applying senior experience and judgment to solve difficult problems and to drive cross-team outcomes for escalations and risk reduction. Acts as a technical lead on escalations and a mentor to the broader support team.
- Works primarily with customer technical stakeholders (Admin/Engineering/Operations) and internal teams ranging from Staff to Executive leadership.
- Operates with autonomy on complex escalations; provides direction and mentorship to less-experienced engineers; participates in ongoing prioritization and activity review.
- Minimum of 5 years of relevant L2/L3 cloud or infrastructure support experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex production escalations. Prior experience as a Cloud/Support Engineer, Escalations Engineer, SRE/DevOps Engineer, or Systems Engineer 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, RHCSA/RHCE, OpenStack-related certifications, cloud provider certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP), or comparable credentials.