Head of Customer Engineering

We are a venture-backed tech startup striving to be the leading force in enabling platform engineers. We raised +$30M from top-tier VCs such as Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, Doordash) and are in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to complement our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe and we have a remote-first work culture.

We're the company behind vCluster, an open-source technology for virtualizing Kubernetes (+10k GitHub stars). Open source is part of our DNA.

The adoption of our commercial product based on vCluster has grown extremely fast (multi-million dollar revenue) and our customer base includes some of the biggest companies in the world, including 6 Global Fortune 500 companies as well as some of the fastest-growing tech unicorns.

As vCluster Labs’ Head of Customer Engineering, you will bridge the gap between technical innovation, solution engineering and customer success, owning the technical strategy for the entire customer lifecycle. You will lead the global technical team through pre-sales Proof of Value (POV) and post-sales Technical Account Management (TAM), ensuring our enterprise customers succeed with our Kubernetes virtualization technology.

As a Head of Customer Engineering, your role will include:

• Global Technical Leadership: Build, lead, and scale a high-performing global team of Solutions Engineers and Technical Account Managers responsible for driving technical wins and long-term adoption.

• Pre-Sales Solution Engineering: Oversee and optimize the Proof of Value (POV) process, ensuring clear success criteria and well-defined timelines for prospective customers to understand the architectural benefits of vCluster and to successfully validate their use cases.

• Post-Sales Success (TAM): Own the post-sales technical relationship, guiding customers through implementation and ensuring retention by driving value realization while identifying expansion opportunities within the account.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as the technical voice of the customer, providing critical feedback to Product and Engineering teams to influence the roadmap based on customer needs that have a clear impact on new business and expansion opportunities as well as on overall retention and customer success.

• Hands-on Engagement: Serve as the primary technical escalation point for key accounts and engage directly with platform architects and tech leaders at Global Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups alike.
  

This role could be a fit for you if you bring:

• Deep Kubernetes Expertise: You possess strong technical depth in Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure, with the ability to understand and discuss complex deployment scenarios and customer issues.

• Lifecycle Management: Proven experience managing both pre-sales (Solution Engineering) and post-sales (TAM/Customer Success) functions, with a track record of successful POV conversion, customer retention and account expansion.

• Leadership Experience: You have led technical customer-facing teams in a high-growth startup or SaaS environment, fostering a culture of technical excellence and customer advocacy.

• Strategic & Tactical Ability: You are capable of defining high-level strategy for customer engineering while remaining hands-on enough to dive into feature configurations and architecture diagrams when needed.

• Communication Skills: You can effectively articulate complex technical concepts to a variety of audiences, from platform engineers to C-level executives.
  

Bonus points for:

• Experience working with open-source commercialization or developer tooling products.

• Experience with on-premise or self-hosted infrastructure software (vSphere, Terraform Enterprise).

• Background in Platform Engineering or experience building internal developer platforms (IDPs).

• Previous experience working with widespread distributed teams in a remote-first environment.

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.

• Platinum-Level Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).

• Flexible Working Schedule:  You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.

• Workplace Flexibility:  We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

Since we are a fast-moving startup, you will not be number 14,589 in our company but rather become an essential part of our team right from the start:

• Fast Application Process: We will typically get back to you within a week. No need to polish your resume for us. Just send us some links (e.g. LinkedIn, etc.), answer a few questions about your previous experiences, and hop on a quick Zoom call with one of our team members to see if you’re a good fit. We will respond quickly and make hiring decisions within days rather than months.

• Open-Minded Work Environment: You can always speak your mind - no company politics or unnecessary formalities. We are operating in a lean, honest, and efficient way and we are looking for different perspectives, constructive feedback and creative, motivated people who want to make a difference.

• Grow With The Company: We are a small company right now but we are growing incredibly fast because we work on something that has a lot of value to engineering teams in large enterprises. Joining vCluster Labs early will give you the chance to advance much faster to the next step on the career ladder than in any larger company.

• Responsibility From Day 1: You will see right from the start that your work will immediately have an impact in our company and you can shape the future of this company together with the rest of our team. Grow with us and benefit from being part of this journey from the start.

At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:

• Technical Excellence: We are determined to build best-in-class technology and ship high-quality software because we know that our users are engineers themselves.

• Customer Obsession: We are going above and beyond to make our customers and users happy, which means striving for great usability, excellent documentation and support as well as fast response times for feature requests and bug reports.

• Impressive Speed: From user feedback to shipping a new feature to address this feedback, we usually take less than a week in most cases and our users absolutely love us for this.

• Bold Innovation: We are constantly questioning the state-of-the-art to find and address important issues in our space, even if that means abandoning any existing technologies and starting from scratch again.

• Open Source & Open Mind: We are actively contributing and maintaining open-source projects and we believe that building an open-minded team culture that respects different perspectives and welcomes constructive feedback is equally paramount to our success.

vCluster Labs provides equal opportunities for all candidates. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive work environment for everyone who becomes part of our team. We are also actively promoting measures to reduce bias throughout our hiring process to ensure that everyone gets the same opportunities.