Head of Business-Critical Services

Head of Business-Critical Services
Remote - US only


About Us:

Platform9: A Better Way to Go Cloud Native

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 trustrooted in customer obsession and an owners mindset. We share context quickly and candidly to keep decisions moving.

With over 30000 nodes in production at some of the worlds 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 valuesinnovation customer obsession ownership radical candor and excellenceguide how we build and support every deployment.

Role Description

Head of Business-Critical Services

Platform9 customers are operating business critical private cloud infrastructure that powers their most important workloads. The Head of Business-Critical Services at Platform9 designs builds and scales the roles services and deliverables that ensure our customers are successful in those endeavors today and in the future.

Key Responsibilities

The Head of Business-Critical Services is expected to:

• Design and build the Business-Critical Service offering at Platform9 including:
  • Technical Account Management
  • Designated Support Engineer
• Design standardized branded Platform9 Business Critical Services deliverables including:
  • Investigation Status Reports
  • Probable Cause Analyses
  • Environmental Health Checks
  • Periodic Business Reports
• Work closely with Platform9 Professional Services and Solutions Architects to develop tools that differentiate the capabilities of Platform9 Business Critical Services.
• Work closely with Platform9 Customer Success Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering to integrate the workflows between the groups to most effectively service Platform9 Business Critical customers.
• Establish and report on metrics and KPIs that reflect the effectiveness of Platform9 Business Critical Services.
• Establish and report on a customer satisfaction evaluation methodology for Platform9 Business Critical Services.
• Set and model the highest standards of professionalism integrity authenticity and service for the Business-Critical Services organization.
• Design competitive pricing strategies for Platform9 Business Critical Services.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with all roles and levels especially senior leadership to drive organizational growth performance and value realization for Business-Critical Services.
• Continuously and relentlessly drive positive behaviors mindshare product adoption and outcomes.
• Evaluate measure and iterate Business-Critical Service deliverables for continuous convergence with customer expectations.

Customer Handling and Communication

Working closely and collaboratively with customer stakeholders and internal cross-functional teams (Support Engineering Product Sales and Services) the Head of Business-Critical Services will ensure the organization becomes deeply familiar with each customers business goals technical requirements architecture operational practices and support history. The role requires proactively identifying risks coordinating escalations guiding best practices and helping customers plan upgrades and expansionswhile also ensuring Platform9 receives structured feedback to improve the product and customer experience.

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 experiencecomfortable 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.
• Demonstrated ability to hire develop and lead high-performing technical teams in a customer success or services capacity.

Technical Knowledge

Broad familiarity across the following areas is expected; in-depth knowledge in three or more 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 troubleshooting workloads).
• OpenStack and/or private cloud infrastructure (compute networking storage concepts; HA/availability patterns; 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 and enforce 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 escalation support for critical customer issues.

Reporting and Interaction

The Head of Business-Critical Services at Platform9 reports directly to the VP of Support and Services

Direct reports include Technical Account Managers and Designated Support Engineers.

Works primarily with customer technical stakeholders (Admin/Engineering/Operations) and internal teams ranging from Staff to C level (Support Engineering Product Sales Services). Expected to partner closely with senior leadership to align Business-Critical Services strategy with company objectives.

Education and Experience

• Minimum of 12 years of relevant experience required including at least 3 years in a leadership role managing technical services support or customer success teams.
• Prior experience as a Technical Account Manager Support/Services Director Escalations Manager SRE/DevOps leader or comparable role is preferred.
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Electrical Engineering or 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.