Senior Customer Engineer

ScyllaDB is the recognized leader in high-performance, low-latency NoSQL databases. Our flagship product, ScyllaDB, is a drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra and DynamoDB that delivers dramatically higher performance and lower node-to-node latency. ScyllaDB is built for applications that require extreme speed at massive scale, empowering industry leaders like Disney, Tesla, Whoop, Mavenir, and Discord to build breakthrough experiences without compromising on performance.

As a startup, we thrive on adaptability, improvisation, and solving hard problems together. Our Customer Engineering team sits at the center of customer success, helping some of the most technically demanding organizations in the world architect, deploy, optimize, and scale mission-critical distributed database environments.

The Position:

ScyllaDB is seeking a highly experienced and customer-focused Senior Customer Engineer to join our global Customer Engineering team.

This is a senior post-sale technical role for an experienced practitioner who thrives in complex customer environments and is capable of independently leading technically demanding customer engagements. As a Senior Customer Engineer, you will serve as a trusted technical advisor for enterprise customers, owning complex implementations, migrations, performance optimization efforts, and escalations while helping drive successful technical outcomes throughout the customer lifecycle.

Beyond direct customer execution, this role carries an expectation of technical leadership within the Customer Engineering organization—mentoring peers, improving operational best practices, and helping scale technical excellence across the team.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise, strong customer engagement skills, sound architectural judgment, and a hands-on bias toward execution.

Key Responsibilities

Advanced Customer Technical Ownership

• Serve as the primary technical advisor for enterprise customer accounts with moderate to high technical complexity.
• Independently lead customer deployments, migrations, upgrades, health reviews, and performance optimization initiatives.
• Conduct deep technical reviews including application architecture, query behavior, driver configurations, infrastructure sizing, replication strategy, and operational best practices.
• Proactively identify technical risks, performance bottlenecks, and adoption opportunities before they become customer-impacting issues.

Complex Troubleshooting & Escalation Management

• Lead troubleshooting for complex customer technical issues involving performance degradation, infrastructure constraints, latency anomalies, scaling concerns, cluster instability, and operational surprises.
• Act as a senior technical escalation resource within the Customer Engineering team.
• Coordinate effectively with Support, Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and Cloud Operations to drive timely issue resolution.
• Maintain calm, effective technical leadership during customer-facing production incidents.

Implementation & Migration Leadership

• Lead technically sophisticated implementation and migration efforts, including production modernization initiatives and migrations from Cassandra, DynamoDB, or related platforms.
• Drive production readiness planning and operational best practices with customer technical teams.
• Ensure technical execution quality across assigned engagements.

Technical Leadership & Team Enablement

• Mentor Customer Engineers through technical coaching, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem solving.
• Contribute to the development of troubleshooting guides, technical playbooks, architectural best practices, and internal enablement materials.
• Help identify repeatable technical challenges and opportunities for process improvement or automation.

Cross-Functional Customer Success Partnership

• Partner closely with Customer Success Managers to support account health, adoption planning, technical risk mitigation, and expansion opportunities.
• Support Sales and Solutions Engineering with technical diligence, customer transitions, and occasional strategic customer engagements.
• Provide actionable field feedback to Product and Engineering teams to improve product usability and customer outcomes.

Technical Community Contribution

• Contribute to internal technical enablement programs, Scylla University content, customer workshops, documentation, blogs, or technical presentations where appropriate.
• Help strengthen ScyllaDB’s technical credibility internally and externally.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in customer-facing technical roles such as Customer Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Professional Services, Site Reliability Engineering, or Distributed Systems Engineering.
• Strong experience supporting enterprise customers in complex post-sale technical environments.
• Hands-on expertise with distributed databases including ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or Datastax Enterprise.
• Strong troubleshooting experience across database performance, infrastructure, distributed systems behavior, and customer production environments.
• Experience leading customer migrations, upgrades, performance tuning initiatives, or architectural modernization efforts.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge and hands-on scripting/programming capability in Python, Java, C++, or similar languages.
• Strong understanding of IP networking, cloud infrastructure, and distributed application architectures.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work directly with customer engineering teams and technical leadership.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor peers and contribute to broader technical team effectiveness.
• Strong autonomous execution, problem solving, and sound judgment in ambiguous situations.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

A Big Plus If You Have

• Deep operational knowledge of ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar distributed data platforms.
• Experience with DynamoDB, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, or related large-scale data technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized infrastructure.
• Public cloud certifications (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Experience building technical automation, operational tooling, or observability solutions.
• Experience supporting SaaS or managed cloud environments.
• Experience delivering technical workshops, enablement sessions, or customer-facing technical presentations.