Job description
Job Title: Director of Strategic Customer Engineering
Location: Remote
Department: Customer Operations
Reports To: VP of Customer Operations
About Platform9:
Platform9 is a leader in simplifying enterprise private clouds. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns existing infrastructure into a full-featured private cloud. Enterprise IT teams can manage VMs and containers with familiar GUI tools and automated APIs in a private, secure environment.
Enterprises are selecting Platform9’s Private Cloud Director to migrate away from legacy virtualization platforms because it meets all of the following enterprise requirements:
- Familiar VM management experience
- Critical enterprise virtualization features: HA, DRR, networking, scale, reliability
- Compatibility with all existing hardware environments, including 3rd-party storage
- Automated migration tooling that lowers cost barrier by 10x
Platform9 was founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers and has over 30,000 nodes in production at some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace. Platform9 is an inclusive, globally distributed company backed by prominent investors, committed to driving private cloud innovation and efficiency.
Position Overview:
We are seeking a Director of Strategic Customer Engineering to lead the operational teams responsible for delivering our Private Cloud Director (PCD) solution to enterprise customers. This is a senior leadership role that requires a rare blend of deep technical expertise, agile program execution, and customer-facing strategy.
You will be accountable for end-to-end delivery of complex deployments, including private cloud architecture, VMware-to-PCD fleet conversions, and automation-driven product integrations. You’ll work cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, and Customer Success to ensure Platform9’s solutions are delivered with excellence, innovation, and impact
Key Responsibilities:
● Lead and scale operational teams, organized in PODs, responsible for deploying Private Cloud Director for enterprise customers.
● Own delivery execution for large-scale, multi-site VMware-to-PCD migration programs using MaaS, Ansible, and vJailbreak tools.
● Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering to shape and influence roadmap items critical to customer delivery success.
Manage and mentor a team of technical leads, solution architects, and migration engineers to deliver outcomes on aggressive timelines.
● Establish and enforce agile delivery practices across PODs, including sprint planning, retrospectives, and cross-POD alignment.
● Act as a strategic point of escalation for customer deployments, ensuring proactive risk mitigation and stakeholder communication.
● Partner with Product, Sales, Customer Success and Technical Account Managers to drive solution adoption, retention, and satisfaction.
● Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for team delivery velocity, quality, and customer impact.
Required Qualifications:
● 10+ years of experience in technical delivery or engineering leadership roles, with at least 3 years in a leadership-level role.
● Deep hands-on knowledge of virtualization platforms (especially VMware), bare metal provisioning (MaaS), Ansible automation, and modern cloud-native infrastructure.
● Proven experience managing complex technical rollouts for enterprise customers in agile environments.
● Strong understanding of infrastructure as code, DevOps practices, and automation frameworks.
● Experience working directly with customers to gather requirements, communicate solutions, and ensure successful delivery.
● Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence product direction based on field learnings.
● Excellent communication, planning, and leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
● Background in building or operating private cloud platforms.
● Familiarity with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and hybrid cloud architectures.
● Experience scaling distributed teams and managing in a matrixed environment.
Why Join Platform9?
● Lead the evolution of private cloud delivery at the cutting edge of cloud-native infrastructure.
● Work with passionate, talented professionals solving hard customer problems.
● Help shape the future of an open, distributed, and automated private cloud platform.
