Self Employed Virtual Machine Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Pre-Sales Engineer

Sidero Labs | North America

ABOUT SIDERO LABS

Sidero Labs builds Talos Linux — the open source Linux distribution purpose-built for Kubernetes — and Omni, our SaaS and self-hosted control plane for managing Kubernetes clusters at scale. We are now extending the platform with Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director: a modern virtualization and infrastructure management stack built to compete directly with VMware vCenter.

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has created one of the largest displacement opportunities in enterprise infrastructure in a decade. Average renewal price increases of roughly 150% and a wave of enterprise contracts expiring through 2027 mean enterprises are actively seeking an exit. Our proof point is real: Yardi runs its production cloud on Talos — 50,000 cores processing billions of dollars in transactions. Your job is to make that migration story repeatable for every enterprise that follows.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The sale is only half the story. Enterprise customers who choose Sidero over VMware are making one of the highest-stakes infrastructure decisions of the decade — replacing a platform their entire organization depends on. The Implementation Consultant is the person who makes that decision look right.

As one of Sidero's first Implementation Consultants, you will own the technical delivery of bare metal to virtual machine migrations from discovery through production cutover. You bring the hands-on depth to assess a customer's physical infrastructure, design the migration architecture in Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director, manage the project through every phase, and be the steady technical presence when things get complicated — which in mission-critical infrastructure migrations, they always do.

You will work directly alongside the Enterprise Account Executive on each engagement, serving as the post-sale technical authority. You come from a VMware Professional Services, Red Hat Consulting, or equivalent background — you have done this before, just on the other side.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Own the delivery. Lead end-to-end implementation of Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director in enterprise customer environments — from initial discovery and environment assessment through pilot deployment, production migration, and customer acceptance.
• Assess before you act. Conduct thorough bare metal environment assessments: hardware inventory, CPU architecture and NUMA topology, memory configuration, storage (local NVMe, SAN, NFS, iSCSI), and physical network topology. Document workload profiles and classify migration complexity before a single VM moves.
• Execute the migration. Design and execute bare metal to virtual machine migrations using Talos Hypervisor — including P2V (physical to virtual), V2V (VMware ESXi to Talos), workload sequencing, cutover planning, and rollback procedures. Manage disk, memory, and vCPU allocation for each workload class.
• Own the network layer. Configure and validate virtual networking in each customer environment: virtual switches, VLANs, bonding and LACP, BGP and network policies via Kubernetes-native constructs, and integration with existing physical network infrastructure.
• Architect storage. Implement and validate storage configurations: local disk provisioning, distributed storage, persistent volumes for stateful workloads, and data migration from VMware vSAN or NFS/iSCSI datastores.
• Stand up the control plane. Deploy and configure Omni for cluster lifecycle management — node enrollment, Kubernetes cluster provisioning, upgrade orchestration, and day-2 operations handoff to the customer's infrastructure team.
• Monitor and validate. Deploy and configure the observability stack for each customer environment as a core deliverable of every implementation — not an afterthought. Stand up Prometheus for metrics scraping and alerting, Grafana dashboards for infrastructure visibility (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network throughput per VM and per node), Elastic for centralized log aggregation and search across the cluster, and Mimir for long-term metrics retention and high-cardinality storage at scale. Deliver a post-migration validation report proving the environment is performing correctly under production load before customer sign-off.
• Own the client relationship. Serve as the primary technical point of contact for each customer engagement — running weekly project status calls, managing the issues log, communicating risk and schedule changes proactively, and escalating to Sidero engineering when you hit a platform edge.
• Document everything. Build and maintain project documentation throughout each engagement: migration runbooks, architecture diagrams, cutover procedures, rollback plans, and customer-facing acceptance test results.
• Build the practice. Contribute reusable playbooks, runbooks, and tooling back to Sidero's growing professional services practice — every engagement makes the next one faster.
• Close the loop. Partner with Sidero engineering and product on field-discovered bugs, edge cases, and customer feature requests — you are the closest person to production reality.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

Required:

• 5 - 7+ years of hands-on infrastructure implementation experience, with at least 3 years in a professional services, consulting, or senior implementation engineer role at a infrastructure software vendor, VAR, or systems integrator.
• Deep VMware platform expertise: vSphere/ESXi hypervisor architecture, vCenter Server, vSAN, NSX-T, vMotion, HA/DRS, and storage policy management. You have performed P2V and V2V migrations at scale and know where they go wrong.
• Demonstrated experience planning and executing bare metal to virtual machine migrations in enterprise environments — workload inventory, dependency mapping, cutover sequencing, rollback planning, and post-migration validation.
• Strong Linux systems depth: Talos Linux is immutable and API-driven, so comfort with Linux internals (kernel, systemd, networking stack, disk management) is non-negotiable. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, or Ubuntu enterprise experience all qualify.
• Kubernetes administration experience: cluster deployment and lifecycle management, node configuration, persistent volumes, networking (CNI plugins), and troubleshooting degraded clusters. CKAD or CKA certification is a strong signal.
• Physical network configuration depth: VLANs, bonding, LACP, BGP basics, firewall rules, and integration between virtual and physical switching. You must be able to design and validate the network layer of a migration, not just hand it off.
• Storage configuration experience across at least two of: local NVMe/SSD provisioning, VMware vSAN, NFS/iSCSI datastores, Ceph, or cloud-native persistent storage. You understand how storage policy affects VM performance and HA behavior.
• Project management discipline: experience managing customer-facing implementation projects with defined milestones, weekly status reporting, issues and risk tracking, and formal customer acceptance. PMP is a plus, not a requirement.
• Strong written and verbal communication — you will author runbooks, lead technical status calls with VP-level customer stakeholders, and represent Sidero's technical credibility in every interaction.

Preferred:

• Direct VMware Professional Services, Red Hat Consulting, or equivalent vendor-side implementation experience — you know what good delivery looks like from the inside of a software vendor.
• Experience with Kubernetes-native virtualization platforms: KubeVirt, OpenShift Virtualization, Harvester, or Proxmox VE. The concepts transfer directly to Talos Hypervisor.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation tooling: Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or equivalent. The ability to script and automate migration steps is a meaningful differentiator.
• Hands-on experience with the full observability and monitoring stack used in modern infrastructure environments: Prometheus for metrics collection and alerting, Grafana for dashboard visualization and operational reporting, Elastic (ELK stack) for log aggregation, search, and analysis across distributed systems, and Mimir for long-term scalable metrics storage at high cardinality. You know how to instrument a migrated environment end-to-end — not just confirm it started, but prove it is performing correctly under load.
• Exposure to high-performance or GPU-dense compute environments — Sidero's production reference includes Yardi's 50,000-core deployment, and future engagements may include AI/GPU infrastructure.
• VMware certifications (VCP-DCV, VCAP, VCDX) or Red Hat certifications (RHCE, RHCA) are strong signals of depth.

Sidero Labs simplifies and secures how businesses run Kubernetes across cloud, edge, and bare metal environments. They replace heavy multi purpose operating systems and manual management tools with a streamlined API driven stack. Our mission is to make distributed systems simple, scalable, and more secure.