Head of Customer Engineering

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 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.

Benefits

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.

At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:

1. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.

2. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.

3. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.

4. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.