Support Engineer

As a Support Engineer, you will be:

• resolving customer issues via email and video conferencing
• collaborating with our Product and Development Teams to build new features and fix bugs.
• creating or updating documentation based on customer interactions.
• working hard to solve customer problems while delighting them along the way
• available for occasional weekend on-call coverage (day-time only - approximately once every three months).
• working alongside Product Managers to define and shape the product goals, roadmap, priorities, and strategy based on your frontline knowledge of customer needs.
• continually researching and learning the current and future best practices of using GitLab
• participating in our hiring processes by reviewing applications and assessments, and by participating in interviews

Projects you might work on:

When you’re not tackling difficult customer challenges, you’ll have a lot of freedom to work on things that will make your life, and the lives of your coworkers, easier. Current and past support engineers have:

• created a tool to quickly analyze strace output
• built and maintained tooling to handle our call scheduling
• scripted a solution to capture the state of a customer’s server for easier troubleshooting
• added functionality to ChatOps to make it easier to identify user accounts on GitLab.com
• written a Chrome Extension to route downloads from Zendesk tickets into organized folders
• … done even more!

Requirements

You should apply if:

You've got the personality

• you're a natural communicator and delight in using those skills to help others.
• you love exploring new technologies and figuring things out the hard way.
• you enjoy solving many small problems per day.

You're a support professional

• you’ve got 2+ years of experience in a support or other service-oriented customer facing role.
• within the last 5 years, you've worked at one company for at least 2 years.
• you’re experienced in writing support content.
• you’re experienced in managing cases throughout the entire support lifecycle from initial customer inquiry to triage and reproduction, writing bug reports for hand off to the development team, and case resolution.
• you understand what it's like to be on-call and can jump into a complex situation and make sense of and communicate clearly to stakeholders what's going on.
• you're comfortable using support platforms such as ZenDesk and Salesforce.

You've got the technical acumen

• you understand DevOps methodologies and you appreciate the value technologies like Serverless and Kubernetes bring to the software deployment and development process.
• you’re able to communicate complex technical topics to customers and coworkers of varying technical skill levels.
• you have excellent Ruby on Rails knowledge and are fluent on the Rails console, or you're proficient in working with another MVC framework (Django, Laravel or others) and will be able to pick up Rails quickly.
• you’re experienced with Git and CI/CD.
• you have the additional experience that our areas of focus might require.

You'll be able to thrive at GitLab

• you can succesfully complete a background check.
• you can demonstrate excellent spoken and written English.
• you have the ability to use GitLab.
• our values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, iteration, and transparency resonate with you.

Support Engineering Areas of Focus

Support Engineers may focus in one of the following areas, so there may be some different requirements depending on your assignment.

Solutions Support Focus

Support Engineers who focus on Solutions Support primarily work with Customers who use GitLab self-managed. They focus on the hard problems of GitLab at scale: performance, architecture, and finding those weird edge cases that need to get surfaced as well-researched bug reports or notes in our documentation.

In addition to the above responsibilities, Support Engineers with this focus will:

• participate in the on-call rotation to provide 24/7 emergency customer response for our self-managed customers.

Additional Requirements:

• excellent Linux systems administration knowledge (LFCE or RHCE equivalent knowledge).

Application Support Focus

Support Engineers who focus on Application Support primarily work with GitLab end-users and the company-level administrators who support them. They are experts at the individual features that make up the GitLab application, and make sure that their expertise translates into customer best practices. They support a mix of self-managed and GitLab.com customers.

In addition to the above responsibilities, Support Engineers with this focus will:

• participate in the GitLab.com Incident Management rotation to provide 24/7 emergency customer response in coordination with the Production team.

Additional Requirements:

• you are process-oriented and comfortable suggesting and implementing improvements to the support workflow.