Sr. Partner Solutions Engineer

Vcluster; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Equity

Platinum-Level Insurance

Flexible Working Schedule

Workplace Flexibility

Job summary

vCluster Labs is hiring a Senior Partner Solutions Engineer to build the technical backbone of our partner ecosystem. You’ll be the first dedicated partner-facing pre-sales engineer, translating partnerships with NVIDIA, WWT, AMD, and AI cloud providers into validated reference architectures and enabled partner pipelines.

You will design reference architectures, enable partners, run POCs, and stand up Centers of Excellence with key customers, while empowering field SEs and sustaining scalable

Qualifications

• Deep Kubernetes cluster architecture and cloud-native work.
• Experience with partners (OEMs, GSIs, resellers or cloud providers) in pre-sales.
• Proven discovery, whiteboarding, demos and POCs that convert to production.
• Experience creating enablement content and workshops for partners.
• Ability to present to both engineers and CIOs in the same meeting.

Responsibilities

• Design and validate reference architectures with key partners and produce BOMs and deployment guides.
• Build and deliver technical enablement for partner architects and sellers.
• Enable internal field SEs to scale partner engagements.
• Own technical discovery, demos, and POCs for partner-sourced opportunities.
• Stand up Centers of Excellence and cultivate executive sponsors.
• Navigate the ecosystem across 6–8 priority partners and drive measurable pipeline.

Skills

Kubernetes expertise

Partner pre-sales

Solutions engineering

Enablement content

Executive presence

NVIDIA ecosystem

AI infra depth

AI cloud / GPU SaaS

Job description

As a Senior Partner Solutions Engineer at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just supporting partner deals; you are building the technical foundation of our partner ecosystem from the ground up. You will be our first dedicated partner-facing pre-sales engineer, turning relationships with NVIDIA, WWT, AMD, and AI Cloud providers like Nebius into validated reference architectures, enabled partner architects, and partner-sourced pipeline. Where there’s a GPU, vCluster needs to be there, and you are the person who makes that real: someone who can whiteboard a GPU cloud architecture with an NVIDIA solution architect in the morning and train a room of partner sellers in the afternoon.

As a Senior Partner Solutions Engineer, your role will include:

• Joint Reference Architectures: Design and validate reference architectures with strategic partners, from NVIDIA blueprints and AMD foundations up through the platform layer: vCluster, vNode, vMetal, and vCluster Platform. Turn one successful deployment into a repeatable, sellable solution with bills of material, deployment guides, demo environments, and benchmarks.
• Partner Enablement: Build and deliver technical enablement for partner architects and sellers, including training dozens of architects at partner Centers of Excellence on the value proposition, cost, and performance story of the vCluster product family, so partners position us to win when we are not in the room.
• Field Enablement: Enable vCluster’s internal field SEs to engage partners effectively, so the partner motion scales beyond one person and the field is never pulled off customers to cover channel work.
• Partner-Led Opportunities: Own technical discovery, demos, and Proofs of Concept for partner-sourced opportunities, always in support of direct field ownership. Run a disciplined POC model: validated business problem, named sponsor, clear success criteria, and a defined production milestone.
• Centers of Excellence: Stand up vCluster presence inside partner Centers of Excellence, such as WWT’s in St. Louis, tied to named customers and qualified pipeline rather than marketing labs.
• Ecosystem Navigation: Build technical credibility across a focused set of 6–8 priority partners, cultivating executive sponsors and technical champions without becoming dependent on a single contact or business unit.

This role could be a fit for you if you bring:

• Deep Kubernetes expertise: You go deep on cluster architecture, Tenant Isolation, and the cloud-native ecosystem, and you can master vCluster, vNode, and vMetal inside and out. This one is required, not preferred.
• Partner pre-sales experience: You have worked with partners (OEMs, GSIs, resellers, or cloud providers) in a technical pre-sales capacity and you understand the partner dynamic: co-selling, joint validation, and winning through someone else’s sellers.
• Solutions engineering craft: Years of discovery, whiteboarding, demos, and POCs that actually convert to production, with the qualification discipline to say no to science projects.
• Enablement building: You have created enablement content, workshops, hands‑on labs, or certification paths from scratch, and the partners you enabled kept winning after you left the room.
• Executive presence: You can hold the room with a Kubernetes engineer and a CIO in the same meeting, and you move people you don’t manage.
• NVIDIA ecosystem experience: DGX, Dynamo, GPU Operator, AI Enterprise, or NVIDIA certifications, plus an understanding of how NVIDIA blueprints and partner validation actually work.
• AI infrastructure depth: GPU infrastructure, storage, and networking for AI factories and GPU clouds (Weka- and VAST-class storage literacy is a plus).
• AI Cloud or GPU-as-a-Service experience: Time building or supporting GPU-as-a-Service or Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms at AI Cloud providers or service providers.

About vCluster Labs

We're the #1 platform for AI infrastructure, trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI cloud builders. We're a venture-backed startup that's raised over $28M from top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, and DoorDash), and we're in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to join our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe with a remote-first culture.

We give AI Cloud providers and AI factories a hyperscaler-like experience on their own GPU infrastructure. Our platform runs the full stack an operator needs, from bare metal provisioning and node lifecycle management up through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters, so they can turn raw GPUs into cluster products they can sell in days instead of spending 12+ months building it themselves. Today we power over 100,000 GPUs and 1 million CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies, backed by a team of 40+ infrastructure engineers who build alongside our customers rather than just shipping them software.

We're the company behind vCluster, the open source technology for tenant isolation on Kubernetes, with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021. Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI, a Kubernetes-native framework built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Platinum-Level Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).
• Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.
• Workplace Flexibility: We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

Culture & Values

Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business.

Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.

Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.

Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.

Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the‑art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission‑critical infrastructure platforms.

Got a referral?

Introduce us to someone in your network who would be a great fit for one of our open roles.