Senior Manager, Sales Engineering — AI / GPU Cloud (NeoCloud)
Mirantis San Jose, California, United States
Software Development · 501-1,000 employees
About the role
You will build and lead the sales engineering team to drive technical wins for complex AI infrastructure deals. This involves defining the pre-sales operating model, architecting solutions, and partnering with account executives to convert strategic opportunities into long-term contracts.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must have extensive hands-on experience with AI/ML infrastructure, specifically distributed training and inference workloads. A deep understanding of the NVIDIA GPU stack, networking fabrics, and enterprise-level sales cycles is essential for this senior leadership role.
Benefits
Full description
Company Description
Mirantis, an IREN company, is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy. https://www.mirantis.com/
Job Description
Why this role exists
K0rdent AI is the orchestration layer that turns raw, disaggregated GPU infrastructure into a multi-tenant, production-ready AI cloud — without locking companies into a single hyperscaler or hardware vendor. We sell accelerated compute: GPU clusters, bare metal, and managed AI infrastructure to Neoclouds, AI-native startups, enterprise AI teams, research labs, and sovereign/regulated buyers. These are technical, high-value, long-cycle deals where the sale is won or lost on credibility: whether we can architect the right cluster, model the real TCO, prove performance, and de-risk a customer's move onto our platform.
This person owns the technical win. They build and lead the sales engineering function that turns "interested" into signed, multi-year committed-capacity contracts, and they set the pre-sales bar as we scale headcount and deal volume.
This is not a demo-jockey role. We need someone who has genuinely stood up training and inference workloads, argued interconnect topology with a customer's ML infra lead, and closed large deals with cycles measured in quarters, not weeks.
What you'll own
Lead and build the SE / Solutions Architect team
- Hire, coach, and retain a team of sales engineers and solutions architects; define the pre-sales operating model as the org scales.
- Build the reusable machinery: discovery frameworks, reference architectures, TCO/benchmark models, POV playbooks, demo and benchmark environments, RFP response libraries.
- Set and hold a technical quality bar across the team; run enablement so every SE can speak credibly to GPU architecture, networking, and orchestration.
Own the technical win in large, complex deals
- Partner with Account Executives as the technical lead on strategic and enterprise opportunities from discovery through technical close.
- Run qualification with a real methodology (MEDDPICC or equivalent) — surface the economic buyer, decision criteria, and the technical champion, and build the win plan around them.
- Architect solutions across compute, networking, storage, and orchestration; produce sizing, capacity plans, and TCO comparisons vs. hyperscalers and self-build.
- Design and drive POCs/POVs: define success criteria up front, run benchmarks, and convert results into commercial momentum.
Be the Technical voice of the Customer internally
- Feed structured product and capacity requirements back to product, platform, and supply/capacity planning.
- Work alongside the NVIDIA field and partner ecosystem (Cloud Partner program, reference architectures, joint pursuits) to strengthen deals.
- Influence roadmap and packaging based on what you learn in the field.
Qualifications
Must-have qualifications:
Real, hands-on AI/ML infrastructure experience
- You have actually run or stood up ML workloads — distributed training and/or production inference — not just talked about them.
- Practical fluency in the training and inference lifecycle: data pipelines, distributed training (multi-node/multi-GPU), fine-tuning, and serving; you understand where bottlenecks actually live (interconnect, memory bandwidth, I/O, scheduling).
- Comfortable in the frameworks and tooling customers use — PyTorch and the surrounding ecosystem (e.g., NCCL, CUDA-level concepts, containers, schedulers).
Deep knowledge of the NVIDIA platform and GPU products
- Current on the NVIDIA compute stack across the Hopper and Blackwell generations (e.g., H100/H200, GB200 NVL72 / B200-class systems, Grace-Hopper superchips) and the reference-system families (DGX, HGX, MGX); aware of what's coming next-generation.
- Networking fluency: NVLink/NVSwitch domains, InfiniBand (Quantum) vs. Spectrum-X Ethernet fabrics, RDMA/RoCE, DPUs — and why fabric choice makes or breaks large training clusters.
- Software and platform layer: NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NIM, NeMo, Triton / TensorRT-LLM, Base Command, Run:ai / GPU orchestration, and the NGC ecosystem.
- Understands the NVIDIA Cloud Partner motion and how to co-sell with NVIDIA.
Enterprise sales engineering on long, high-value cycles
- Track record supporting complex B2B deals with cycles of 6–18+ months and large ACV/TCV, ideally including multi-year committed-capacity or reserved-capacity structures.
- Skilled at multi-stakeholder navigation — ML/infra leads, platform engineering, procurement, finance, security, and executive sponsors.
- Can build and defend a TCO/ROI model against hyperscaler and on-prem alternatives, and translate performance benchmarks into commercial value.
Proven team leadership
- Has hired, developed, and led a sales engineering / solutions architecture team (or clearly demonstrated the readiness to), including building process and enablement from a light or greenfield starting point.
- Player-coach mindset: still credible in the room on the hardest deals, while scaling others to do the same.
Strongly preferred
- Experience selling GPU cloud, HPC, or specialized infrastructure — ideally at a NeoCloud / GPU-cloud provider, hyperscaler AI org, or accelerated-hardware vendor.
- Hands-on with cloud-native and cluster orchestration for AI: Kubernetes (and GPU operators / device plugins), Slurm, and multi-cluster management approaches; familiarity with virtualized GPU / KubeVirt-style patterns is a plus.
- Storage-for-AI literacy — high-throughput parallel/object storage and its role in training pipelines.
- Experience with data center economics and constraints: power, cooling, rack density, and how capacity availability shapes deals.
- Exposure to sovereign, regulated, or government AI buyers.
What good looks like
First 90 days: deep on our platform and differentiators; embedded as technical lead on the top active opportunities; a clear read on the current team, gaps, and the pre-sales process to fix first.
6 months: a repeatable POV and TCO framework in use across the team; measurable improvement in technical-win rate and POC-to-close conversion; a hiring plan (or hires) closing the biggest coverage gaps.
12 months: a scaled, high-credibility SE org that AEs actively pull into strategic deals; SE involvement correlated with larger deal size, faster technical close, and higher win rate on the deals that matter most.
Compensation & logistics
Structure: competitive base + variable tied to team bookings/attainment, plus equity.
- Indicative OTE: senior people-leader band for AI-infra pre-sales, strong candidates in this space command a premium.
- Location / travel: remote or. hub-based, expect meaningful travel to customers, data centers, and NVIDIA/partner events.
Additional Information
What does Mirantis offer you?
- Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry;
- Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies;
- Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation;
- Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued;
- Professional development and training;
- Attend conferences and working groups;
- Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks;
- Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan.
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