Customer Success Engineer - Instaclustr

LOCATION

United States, Remote. Massachusetts, particularly Greater Boston, is preferred. Candidates in other U.S. locations will be considered based on strong hands-on expertise in Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, or OpenSearch and experience supporting complex enterprise environments. Travel to customer sites and periodic team gatherings as needed.

JOB SUMMARY

Instaclustr, part of NetApp, helps enterprises run business-critical applications through managed open-source database, streaming, and search technologies. As a Customer Success Engineer, you will partner with some of our most strategic customers to solve complex technical challenges, guide large-scale migrations, and deliver the performance, reliability, and scale their businesses depend on.

Working alongside the Customer Success Manager (CSM), you will lead the technical customer engagement. The CSM drives the overall customer success plan; you bring the technical depth to understand customer applications and architecture, define requirements, guide infrastructure decisions, and help new workloads succeed in production. You will work directly with customer engineers, architects, and executives while partnering with Instaclustr Support, Product, and Engineering. From planning major migrations to uncovering performance risks and influencing product improvements, your work will directly shape customer outcomes. Join a collaborative global team where your technical judgment matters, your recommendations influence real decisions, and you can build lasting relationships while solving meaningful engineering challenges at enterprise scale.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Serve as the trusted technical advisor for strategic customers, developing a deep understanding of their applications, architecture, operational priorities, and growth plans.
• Translate business objectives into technical requirements, including workload characteristics, performance targets, capacity needs, and measurable success criteria.
• Guide architecture and sizing recommendations with internal technical teams, helping customers make informed decisions about infrastructure, scalability, and reliability.
• Lead technical readiness planning for migrations, new workloads, deployments, upgrades, and infrastructure changes. Identify prerequisites, dependencies, and risks before execution.
• Proactively assess customer environments for recurring issues, operational patterns, architectural concerns, and product gaps. Recommend improvements before risks become escalations.
• Coordinate complex technical escalations across Support, Product, Engineering, and customer teams, establishing clear ownership and driving progress through resolution.
• Anticipate capacity requirements associated with workload growth, traffic events, regional expansion, and upcoming migrations.
• Identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and optimize cost while protecting performance, reliability, and future growth.
• Align customer technical roadmaps with Instaclustr capabilities and represent customer requirements in discussions with Product and Engineering.
• Maintain visibility across technical commitments and parallel workstreams, ensuring clear owners, current status, and follow-through.
• Lead technical working sessions and contribute insights to customer business reviews, highlighting environment health, accomplishments, emerging risks, and upcoming decisions.
• Partner with the CSM to connect technical execution with customer adoption, long-term value, and continued growth.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, or OpenSearch, with deep expertise in at least one. Ability to troubleshoot production issues and explain architecture, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
• Six or more years of relevant technical experience in customer success engineering, technical account management, solutions architecture, consulting, site reliability engineering, or a comparable role supporting complex platforms.
• Experience supporting enterprise customers with business-critical production environments and building credibility with engineers, architects, and executive stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including scalability, availability, performance, capacity planning, and operational reliability.
• Experience with AWS, Google Cloud, and/or Microsoft Azure, including translating customer requirements into practical architecture and infrastructure recommendations.
• Experience guiding migrations, deployments, upgrades, or other significant technical changes, including assessing readiness and managing technical dependencies.
• Strong troubleshooting skills and technical judgment. Comfortable investigating ambiguous problems, asking thoughtful questions, and engaging the right experts.
• Ability to lead technical discussions and communicate clearly with both technical practitioners and business leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities, coordinate cross-functional work, identify and mitigate technical risk, and drive commitments through completion.
• A proactive, customer-focused approach and enthusiasm for helping enterprises succeed with open-source technology.
• Willingness to travel and spend time onsite with customers as needed.