Designated Services Engineer - NCP (Remote US)

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Openkrill is seeking a Senior Designated Services Engineer to own the customer relationship for WEKA within AI hyperscaler environments. You will blend hands-on engineering with programmatic leadership to ensure architecture, deployment, performance, and issue resolution across WEKA clusters.

You will monitor proactively, coordinate across WEKA teams, and deliver timely RCAs while guiding strategic upgrades and expansions. Travel to customer sites will be required as needed.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in customer-facing, deep technical problem-solving roles.
• Hands-on experience supporting Linux-based enterprise infrastructure at scale.
• Experience in L3 support and direct customer interaction for enterprise infrastructure products.
• Deep understanding of networking: InfiniBand, Ethernet, RDMA, DPDK, and UCX.
• Strong fluency in Kubernetes and containerization, including persistent storage, CSI, and operators.
• Experience with GPU, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure. Comfort with performance benchmarking.
• Proficiency with at least one major cloud: AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, or Google Cloud.
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or Ansible for monitoring, diagnostics, and repeatable tasks.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Proven ability to resolve complex customer problems and escalations.
• Experience leading customer reviews, planning upgrades, and managing multiple workstreams.

Responsibilities

• Own the WEKA cluster environment and tenant workloads, tracking changes and configs.
• Proactively monitor health using WEKA tools and perform root-cause analysis.
• Resolve customer issues end-to-end, coordinating with engineering and R&D.
• Bridge to Engineering and Product to prioritize fixes and improvements.
• Advise on design, scale, and tenancy for customers and coordinate resources.
• Drive verification of GPU nodes, networking, and WEKA Kubernetes components.
• Tune performance for training, inference, and checkpointing; set baselines.
• Deliver continuity for expansions and new deployments within the existing engagement.

Skills

Customer-facing

Deep technical problem-solving

Linux-based infra

Kubernetes

Networking

Python/Bash/Ansible

Observability

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Ansible

WEKA

Job description

AI Hyperscalers build GPU platforms and sell them to their own customers. WEKA is the data layer under those platforms. As Senior Designated Services Engineer, you are the named engineer for an assigned AI Hyperscaler. You know the environment as your own. You work proactively, not from a ticket queue. You are the owner of the account relationship and the escalation path into WEKA.

This role blends the DSE and the TAM. About 80% of your time is hands-on engineering: architecture, deployment, performance, and issue resolution. About 20% is programmatic: the cadence, reviews, planning, and reporting that keep the customer’s needs covered over time. You own both.

Premium Services coverage is business hours in the customer’s geography, single or multi-geo.

Engineering and Operational Ownership (about 80%)

• Know the environment. Hold a current picture of the customer's WEKA clusters, client fleet, networks, Kubernetes deployments, and tenant workloads. Track changes and configuration.
• Monitor proactively. Use WEKA Home, autosupport, observability, and remote monitoring to find risk before it reaches production. Act on it.
• Resolve technical problems. Own customer issues from open to root cause. Engage WEKA Engineering, GRE, and R&D when needed. Deliver clear, timely RCAs.
• Bridge to Engineering. Carry customer needs to Engineering and Product when features, reliability, or documentation fall short. Help prioritize bugs, serviceability, and supportability.
• Recommend architecture. Advise the customer on design, scale, and tenancy. Align the right senior WEKA resources, or execute the recommendation yourself.
• Own the client layer. Drive verification of GPU node clients, BlueField-3 and SR-IOV networking, routed tenant networks, mount options, cgroups, and the WEKA Kubernetes operator and CSI driver. Validate configuration and scripts before deployment.
• Optimize for the workload. Work with the customer and possibly its end customers to tune performance for training, inference, and checkpointing. Set baselines. Run and interpret performance tests.
• Deliver continuity. Execute expansions and new deployments within the existing engagement. No separate implementation project spin-up. The next cluster starts with the engineer already in the environment.
• Direct the Administrator. Where a WEKA Data Platform Administrator is assigned, you are the technical owner. You set direction and take escalations.
• Build durable artifacts. Write runbooks, KB articles, postmortems, and automation. Leave the environment better documented every quarter.
• Work the account team. Support Sales Engineering, partners, and account teams with credible technical depth in front of senior customer stakeholders.

Programmatic Ownership (about 20%)

• Run the cadence. Lead regular operating reviews with the NCP. Bring health, risks, open cases, and decisions needed.
• Deliver executive reviews. Prepare and present technical business reviews with outcomes, trends, and recommendations for customer's leadership.
• Plan releases and upgrades. Assess the environment, analyze bug and field-alert risk, and build upgrade plans with the customer and WEKA teams.
• Track the program. Maintain a single view of open issues, feature requests, roadmap dependencies, and commitments. Keep owners and dates current.
• Report on account health. Deliver periodic and custom reports. Tell leadership what changed, what is at risk, and what happens next.
• Plan for growth. Work with the account team on capacity, expansion, and new tenant onboarding so the customer scales without surprises.
• Coordinate across WEKA. Align Sales, Professional Services, Technical Services, Product, and R&D around the NCP’s priorities.
• Educate. Tell customers about new features, field alerts, and best practices that matter to their environment.

Requirements

• 10+ years in customer-facing, deep technical problem-solving roles.
• Hands-on experience supporting Linux-based enterprise infrastructure at scale: storage, networking, virtualization, and cloud.
• Experience in L3 support and direct customer interaction for enterprise infrastructure products.
• Deep understanding of networking: InfiniBand, Ethernet, RDMA, DPDK, and UCX.
• Strong fluency in Kubernetes and containerization, including persistent storage, CSI, and operators.
• Experience with GPU, HPC, or AI/ML infrastructure. Comfort with performance benchmarking and diagnosing bottlenecks.
• Proficiency with at least one major cloud: AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, or Google Cloud.
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or Ansible for monitoring, diagnostics, and repeatable tasks.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Proven ability to resolve complex customer problems and escalations using the right internal and external resources.
• Experience leading customer reviews, planning upgrades, and managing multiple workstreams at once.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can brief an engineer and a CTO on the same day.
• Strong technical writing.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed.

It’s Nice If You Have

• Prior support or engineering experience at a cloud provider, GPU cloud, or HPC company.
• Experience with WEKA or another parallel or distributed file system.
• Experience with NVIDIA DGX-class systems, Slurm, or multi-tenant AI platforms.
• Experience with infrastructure as code or configuration management (Ansible, Terraform).
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, Slack, and collaboration between support, product, and engineering teams.

What Success Looks Like

• The customer treats you as its engineer on the WEKA side. They call you first.
• You find problems before the customer does.
• Tenants onboard faster, and workloads hit their performance targets.
• Client-layer issues are caught in verification, not in production.
• Expansions and new deployments start from your knowledge of the environment, with no cold handoff.
• Executive reviews change what the customer does next.
• Runbooks, dashboards, and postmortems raise the operational maturity of the account.
• Escalations reach Engineering complete, with evidence and a clear ask.

The WEKA Way

We are Accountable: We take full ownership, always-even when things don't go as planned. We lead with integrity, show up with responsibility & ownership, and hold ourselves and each other to the highest standards.

We are Brave: We question the status quo, push boundaries, and take smart risks when needed. We welcome challenges and embrace debates as opportunities for growth, turning courage into fuel for innovation.

We are Collaborative: True collaboration isn’t only about working together. It’s about lifting one another up to succeed collectively. We are team-oriented and communicate with empathy and respect. We challenge each other and conduct positive conflict resolution. We are being transparent about our goals and results. And together, we’re unstoppable.

We are Customer Centric: Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. We actively listen and prioritize the success of our customers, and every decision we make is driven by how we can better serve, support, and empower them to succeed. When our customers win, we win.