Technical Account Manager (Americas)

TECHNICAL ACCOUNT MANAGER (TAM)
LOCATION: AMER (North and South America only)
Remote

About Us:

Platform9: Private Clouds Made Easy

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—innovation, customer obsession, ownership, radical candor, and excellence—guide how we build and support every deployment.

As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) at Platform9, you will combine strong technical depth with account management skills to deliver Personalized, Proactive, Preventative, and Reactive enterprise-class support and customer success services. You will act as a trusted technical advisor to assigned customers and a key partner to the Account/Sales Team, helping customers achieve reliability, performance, and adoption outcomes across the Platform9 portfolio (e.g., Private Cloud Director, Kubernetes platforms, and associated infrastructure integrations).

Working closely and collaboratively with customer stakeholders and internal cross-functional teams (Support, Engineering, Product, Sales, and Services), you will become deeply familiar with each customer’s business goals, technical requirements, architecture, operational practices, and support history. You’ll proactively identify risks, coordinate escalations, guide best practices, and help customers plan upgrades and expansions—while also ensuring Platform9 receives structured feedback to improve the product and customer experience.

Essential Functions

Technical Account Managers work with Platform9 customers and the assigned Account/Sales Team by providing expertise in the following areas:

• Own technical relationship and outcomes for a portfolio of enterprise customers, acting as the primary technical point-of-contact for ongoing success and support coordination.
• Identify, manage, and drive resolution of critical technical issues (escalations) and customer-impacting risks; coordinate necessary support activities across Platform9 Support, Engineering, Product, and partner/3rd-party vendors in multi-vendor environments.
• Monitor and manage open cases during business hours; ensure clear prioritization, timely updates, and strong issue hygiene (repro steps, logs, timelines, customer impact, and workaround status).
• Perform environment assessments and documentation, including architecture reviews, configuration validation, and operational readiness checks for production clusters.
• Plan and guide lifecycle activities, including upgrades, patching, expansion, capacity planning, and release planning—aligned with customer maintenance windows and change processes.
• Proactively analyze risk using known issues, release notes, bug advisories, and customer-specific configurations; provide clear, actionable guidance to reduce incidents and downtime.
• Monitor customer environments using available telemetry/health signals (where enabled) and customer-shared observability data to identify trends, emerging issues, and optimization opportunities.
• Ensure adherence to Platform9 best practices for reliability, security, and performance (e.g., HA design, networking/storage configuration, cluster operations, RBAC, and upgrade practices).
• Prepare and deliver periodic and custom reports (e.g., case review summaries, incident postmortems, health checks, adoption progress, operational risks, upgrade readiness).
• Communicate new capabilities and recommendations (new features, platform changes, field/product alerts, and operational guidance) in a way that’s relevant to the customer’s goals.
• Educate customers on Platform9 tools, workflows, and operational patterns; drive enablement for platform administrators and operators.
• Compile and deliver root cause analysis as required, coordinating internally to ensure completeness and clarity (symptoms, contributing factors, corrective actions, prevention).
• Represent Platform9 in recurring support/customer success meetings (e.g., weekly operational check-ins, incident reviews, QBRs/EBRs), translating technical status into business impact.
• Manage special projects as assigned by management to meet customer and cross-functional team needs (e.g., onboarding improvements, escalation process refinement, product feedback loops).

Core skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong interpersonal skills and customer service mindset; ability to build trust with customer stakeholders and collaborate effectively across internal teams.
• Account management and project/program management experience—comfortable driving action plans, timelines, and executive-ready status updates.
• Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and applying them in customer-facing environments.
• Creative, structured approach to problem solving; strong troubleshooting instincts and escalation leadership.

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 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).
• Travel to customer domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.
• 24x7 availability for after-hours on-call support for critical customer issues (per rotation/policy).

Responsibility and Interaction

Responsibility

• Responsible for a mix of structured and unstructured work, applying experience and judgment to solve routine to moderately complex problems and to drive cross-team outcomes for escalations and risk reduction.

Interaction

• Works primarily with customer technical stakeholders (Admin/Engineering/Operations) and internal teams ranging from Staff to Director level (Support, Engineering, Product, Sales, Services).
• Receives general direction on routine work and detailed direction on new projects/assignments; participates in ongoing prioritization and activity review.
• Expected to be a key contributor and, at times, a lead on team initiatives that improve customer outcomes and operational excellence.

Education and Experience

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience is required. Prior experience as a Technical Support Engineer, Escalations Engineer, Technical Account Manager, SRE/DevOps Engineer, Systems Engineer, and/or Project/Program Manager 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, RHCE, CCNA/CCNP, OpenStack-related certifications, cloud provider certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP), or comparable credentials.