Technical Sales Engineer — Kubernetes & Virtualization

About Sidero Labs

Sidero Labs builds software that makes modern infrastructure simpler, safer, and easier to operate. Talos Linux is an open source, immutable operating system purpose-built for Kubernetes. Talos Omni is our SaaS and self-hosted platform for managing Kubernetes clusters at scale. We are also expanding into virtualization, with new products coming soon that will bring Sidero Labs’ secure, API-driven operating model to a broader range of workloads and infrastructure.

We are a remote-first company with a deeply technical culture and a growing community of customers and open source users. Our teams work closely across Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Experience to solve consequential infrastructure problems.

The opportunity

As a Technical Sales Engineer, you will own the technical path from discovery through technical close—and stay engaged through the first mile of customer onboarding. You will help prospective customers understand how Sidero Labs fits into their environment, design and lead product demonstrations and proofs of value, resolve technical blockers, and give customer teams the knowledge and confidence to move forward.

This is a deeply hands-on infrastructure role within the sales organization. You will be expected to design, demonstrate, deploy, and troubleshoot complex environments across Kubernetes, Linux, virtualization, compute, networking, and storage. We are looking for people who have built and operated these systems on bare metal and in private or public clouds—not candidates whose infrastructure experience is limited to consuming managed cloud services.

The role spans cloud-native and traditional infrastructure. You will work with Talos Linux and Talos Omni for Kubernetes use cases while also preparing for and supporting new products coming soon in the virtualization space. Those engagements may involve virtual machines, compute, storage, networking, availability, and migration from established virtualization platforms. You do not need to be equally specialized in every layer, but you must be able to reason credibly across the stack and go deep when the evaluation requires it.

This is primarily a pre-sales role with meaningful continuity after signature. You will partner closely with an Enterprise Account Executive and work across Product, Engineering, and Customer Experience to create a smooth transition from evaluation to initial deployment and long-term ownership.

We expect to hire at the Technical Sales Engineer level, with flexibility to calibrate title, territory, and scope for the experience and seniority of the successful candidate.

What you will do

Lead technical discovery. Understand the customer’s business goals, current architecture, operational model, security requirements, and decision criteria. For virtualization opportunities, assess the relevant compute, network, storage, availability, workload, and migration requirements.
Design the solution. Translate customer requirements into clear architectures using Talos Linux and Talos Omni today and Sidero Labs’ forthcoming virtualization products as they become available, including integrations with the customer’s existing infrastructure and operating practices.
Demonstrate the platform. Deliver compelling product demonstrations, architecture sessions, technical workshops, and executive-ready explanations tailored to each audience and use case.
Own proofs of value. Define measurable success criteria, scope and sequence the evaluation, guide deployment and testing, troubleshoot blockers, document results, and drive the technical decision to closure.
Support virtualization evaluations. Help customers evaluate alternatives to existing hypervisor and management stacks, including VM lifecycle management, high availability and disaster recovery expectations, networking and storage dependencies, and V2V or P2V migration considerations.
De-risk the path to production. Develop reference architectures, validation plans, migration-readiness guidance, and clear assumptions around workload sequencing, cutover, rollback, performance, and operational acceptance.
Guide early onboarding. Preserve technical continuity after the sale by participating in kickoff, guiding initial deployment and configuration, delivering enablement sessions, and handing off architecture decisions, success criteria, open issues, and runbooks to the customer and ongoing Sidero Labs teams.
Be a trusted technical advisor. Build durable relationships with platform, infrastructure, security, and operations teams. Give clear recommendations, surface risk honestly, and help customers make sound decisions—not just understand Sidero Labs products.
Create reusable technical assets. Develop demo environments, solution briefs, reference architectures, competitive guidance, workshop content, evaluation templates, and onboarding materials that make future engagements faster and more consistent.
Close the product loop. Bring field feedback, bugs, edge cases, competitive insights, and feature requests to Product and Engineering with enough context to support prioritization.
Represent Sidero Labs in the field. Travel as needed, with regular trips expected for customer meetings, partner sessions, conferences, workshops, and team gatherings. Travel will vary with territory and sales activity rather than follow a fixed percentage.

What you will bring

Required

5+ years of experience in sales engineering, solutions architecture, technical consulting, implementation engineering, or another customer-facing infrastructure role.
Hands-on production experience with both Kubernetes and enterprise virtualization. You may be deeper in one domain, but you can discover, design, demonstrate, deploy, and troubleshoot credibly across both.
Experience building and operating infrastructure on bare metal or in private-cloud environments. Public-cloud experience is valuable when paired with a strong understanding of the underlying compute, network, storage, Linux, and virtualization layers.
Strong understanding of Kubernetes architecture and operations, including cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, observability, security, and troubleshooting.
Working knowledge of enterprise virtualization concepts and platforms, including hypervisors, centralized management, VM lifecycle, resource allocation, networking, storage, high availability, disaster recovery, and migration planning. Experience with VMware vSphere/ESXi and vCenter is especially relevant.
Strong Linux systems knowledge and comfort with API-driven, automated, or immutable infrastructure.
Experience designing and running technical demonstrations, workshops, proofs of concept or value, and success criteria for enterprise evaluations.
Ability to troubleshoot across infrastructure layers and coordinate effectively with product and engineering teams when an issue reaches a platform edge.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain complex systems to hands-on engineers, architects, business stakeholders, and executives.
A relationship-first, consultative approach and a genuine interest in helping customers become capable and self-sufficient.
Comfort working autonomously in a remote, fast-moving environment.
Professional fluency in spoken and written English.

Preferred

Hands-on experience with Talos Linux and Talos Omni.
Experience with Kubernetes-native or modern virtualization platforms such as KubeVirt, OpenShift Virtualization, Harvester, or Proxmox VE.
Deeper VMware experience across technologies such as vSAN, NSX, vMotion, HA/DRS, and storage policy management.
Experience with infrastructure networking and storage, such as VLANs, bonding/LACP, BGP, NFS, iSCSI, NVMe, Ceph, or cloud-native persistent storage.
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi.
Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, or Mimir and with defining performance and operational acceptance criteria.
Experience supporting early customer onboarding, implementation planning, technical enablement, or professional services engagements.
Relevant Kubernetes, VMware, Linux, or cloud certifications. Certifications are helpful signals, not requirements.
Additional language fluency relevant to European markets is a plus for Europe-based hires.

Why join Sidero Labs

Work across Kubernetes and virtualization at a moment when infrastructure teams are reconsidering long-held assumptions.
Shape the technical sales and onboarding playbook for today’s Kubernetes platform and new products coming soon in virtualization.
Collaborate directly with deeply technical customers and with Sidero Labs Product and Engineering teams.
Join a remote-first company with a strong open source community and engineering culture.
Participate in a performance-based compensation plan and receive a benefits package.

Compensation approach

This is a performance-based technical sales role. Technical Sales Engineer plans are generally designed around a 70/30 mix of base and variable compensation. The final mix may vary based on geography, experience, seniority, territory, and agreed scope.

Apply

Apply through the job posting or email your resume and a brief note of interest to hiring@SideroLabs.com.