Job Description

About the Role

The Principal Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a senior, deeply technical post-sales role focused on driving successful adoption of Azul Prime within a portfolio of strategic customers. Unlike a traditional TAM role, this position is hands-on and technical first. You will spend the majority of your time engaged with customer engineering teams on JVM performance tuning, troubleshooting, reliability engineering, and architectural guidance. Strong relationship skills matter, but it is technical credibility with developers, SREs, and architects that makes this role successful.

You will be trusted by Azul’s most important accounts to ensure that their mission-critical Java applications run on Prime with the best possible performance, stability, and cost efficiency — and you will serve as the bridge between customers and Azul’s engineering organization, feeding real-world insights back into the product.

What Makes This Role Different

• Technical depth first. Expect to spend significant time reading thread dumps, GC logs, and flight recordings — not building slide decks.
• Direct partnership with Azul engineering. You will work side-by-side with our runtime, GC, JIT compiler, and tooling teams on complex customer issues.
• Ownership of technical outcomes. You own production adoption of Azul Prime within your accounts — from candidate application selection through successful rollout and ongoing optimization.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Account Ownership

• Own a portfolio of named strategic customers (typically $500K+ ACV), with flexibility to engage additional high-value Azul Prime customers as opportunities arise.
• Build and maintain deep, long-term relationships with technical stakeholders — SREs, Java developers, platform engineers, and architects.
• Partner closely with Sales, Customer Success, and Support on joint account planning, renewals, and expansion opportunities.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the primary technical advisor for Azul Prime across your accounts.
• Lead troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and performance tuning engagements for JVM-based applications running at enterprise scale.
• Provide architectural guidance on reliability, scalability, latency, throughput, and cloud cost optimization.
• Work with customers to identify and qualify candidate applications for Azul Prime, then partner with them through successful production deployment.

Product & Engineering Partnership

• Collaborate with Azul’s runtime, compiler, GC, and tooling engineering teams to resolve complex technical issues.
• Channel structured, actionable customer feedback into Azul’s product and engineering organizations to help shape the roadmap.
• Act as a senior point of technical escalation for high-severity issues within your accounts.

Enablement & Knowledge Sharing

• Design and deliver customer-facing workshops, training sessions, and technical business reviews.
• Create and maintain high-quality technical documentation, runbooks, and reusable customer-facing assets for Azul Prime.
• Share knowledge internally, mentoring peers across the TAM, Sales Engineering, and Support organizations.
• Keep internal systems current with account activity, engagement notes, and customer outcomes.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years in senior technical roles such as software engineering, SRE, performance engineering, or cloud/platform engineering.
• 8+ years in customer-facing technical roles (TAM, solutions architect, consulting engineer, or SRE with direct customer engagement).
• Strong working knowledge of Java programming and JVM internals — garbage collection, JIT compilation, class loading, threading, and memory model.
• Demonstrated experience tuning and troubleshooting enterprise-scale Java applications in production.
• Demonstrated ability to perform root cause analysis and apply structured problem-solving techniques.
• Strong Linux fundamentals, including shell scripting and performance troubleshooting on Linux systems.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure), and containerization (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for audiences ranging from individual engineers to senior executives.
• Based in North America and able to travel occasionally to customer sites (typically 10–20%).



Preferred Qualifications

• Deep specialization in JVM performance tuning, GC behavior analysis, and low-latency Java applications.
• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, JFR, or similar APM tools).
• Familiarity with microservices architectures and modern cloud-native Java deployment patterns.
• Cloud platform certification (AWS, Azure, GCP) or SRE-related certifications.
• Contributions to open-source Java projects or active participation in the broader Java technical community.
• Experience using Jira and Confluence to raise bugs and maintain documentation.
• Prior experience with Azul Prime, OpenJDK, HotSpot, or other commercial Java runtimes.

Why Azul

At Azul, you will work alongside a team of Java experts who genuinely love the platform, on problems that matter to some of the most demanding engineering organizations in the world. Our technology powers mission-critical Java workloads at massive scale, and our customers rely on us precisely because we go deeper on Java than anyone else. If you want your technical expertise to have outsized impact — and you want to be surrounded by people who share that passion — we would love to talk!