Technical Account Manager

About Us:

Platform9: Private Clouds Made Easy
Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise private clouds. 

Enterprises are struggling to find a better way to run their cloud infrastructure: on the one hand, they have woken up to the staggering true cost of public cloud providers, and on the other hand, they are also painfully aware of daunting virtualization costs and engineering complexity of running a private cloud. Platform9 provides the solution: a better way to deploy, operate and scale private clouds.  

The company’s flagship product, Private Cloud Director, delivers an open, comprehensive private cloud platform that is developer-friendly and cost-effective, while enabling enterprise IT teams with critical capabilities they need to modernize their legacy virtualized infrastructure. 

Platform9 was founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers and has over 20,000 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.

All this means that the future for Platform9, for our customers, and for our team is bright and exciting. We’re big enough that we have survived many market shifts and economic climates, and we are small enough that we retain a high energy start-up culture. We value customer obsession, innovation, openness, bias towards action, and speed. And we are looking to add a seasoned cloud talent to our tight-knit team.
 

About The Role

We are searching for an inventive, gregarious, and collaborative Technical Account Manager (TAM). This role works directly with customers approximately half of the time. The remainder is spent informing product and operational decisions on the customer's behalf. A TAM is a message bus between every organization within Platform9 and its customers – in the best possible way.

There are no requirements for on-call rotation or travel.

You will succeed in this role if you are happy to bring the collaborative attitude of open development to customer discussions. You will enjoy this role if you love empowering others to treat infrastructure like a utility. "It just works when I flip the switch."

Core Responsibilities

Be a customer advocate. Provide constructively assertive feedback and perspectives in discussions. Explore our products and features from different customer perspectives, and propose opportunities for enhancement.

Be a customer liaison. Maintain customer relationships with recurring sync meetings. Understand the environment, general business model, culture, and use cases for each customer. Proactively engage with customers during high-impact events, both planned and unplanned. Catalyze the flow of information between Platform9 and our customers. Build genuine, inviolate trust with every customer.

The Cool Parts

• You will work with a tight-knit team in a company that truly cares about your well-being.
• You will meet people, both at Platform9 and on customer teams, that become genuine friends.
• You will make the world a little more efficient by allowing customers to focus on their work, not the thing that allows them to do work.

Required Experience, Knowledge, and Skills

• 3+ years in technical roles with customer-oriented responsibilities
• 3+ years of experience using, operating, or administering Linux or POSIX-ish systems
• A conspicuous need for punctuality, organization, and clear communication
• A detailed understanding of multiple technical topics (e.g. TCP/IP networking, data structures, networked storage, ...)
• A detailed understanding of containerization and virtualization
• Are currently, or are willing to become, a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Experience with scripting / programming for data reporting and analysis
• A passion for continuous education and academic collaboration
• The ability to explain a concept or topic to any audience
• Comfort with public speaking and presentations

Bonus Experience, Knowledge, and Skills

• Experience as a Product Management Engineer, Technical Product Manager, Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Developer Advocate
• experience in a security or compliance role
• A functional understanding of general business practices and terminology
• An unquenchable thirst for building awesome things with peers
• An aptitude for automation and templating