Senior Technical Support Engineer

Senior Technical Support Engineer

Technical support for the people building software — not a script, not a queue, and definitely not a call center.

LOCATION NYC or San Francisco - WORK MODEL 5 days in office - BASE SALARY $160K–$180K - TYPE Full-time + equity

The Quick Read

A fast-growing developer-infrastructure startup is hiring two senior technical support engineers to help build its support function before it becomes large, layered, and difficult to change. The customers are engineering teams running business-critical CI workloads. They do not need canned answers. They need someone who can understand what broke, reproduce the problem, communicate clearly, and pull the right people together to fix it.

Why This Role Exists

The product is already proving itself on speed and cost. The company is now moving further into the enterprise, where trust matters just as much as performance. Larger engineering organizations need to know that when a critical workflow fails, the support experience will be fast, technical, accountable, and calm. That is the job: help make technical support a reason customers grow with the platform, not a concern they have to work around.

What You'll Really Do

• Work directly with software engineers through Slack and a modern support platform to diagnose complex CI and infrastructure issues.
• Reproduce customer problems, isolate likely causes, and partner closely with product and engineering until the issue is resolved.
• Create the playbooks, escalation paths, service standards, runbooks, and SLAs the next wave of support hires will inherit.
• Notice patterns across customer issues and turn them into useful product and engineering feedback.
• Use automation and AI to remove repetitive support work instead of solving scale by adding more manual process.
• Help define what excellent enterprise support should look like while the function is still small enough to shape.

A Week Might Include

• Digging into a failed workflow involving Docker, Linux, caching, networking, permissions, or CI configuration.
• Recreating an issue in a controlled environment so engineering has something concrete to inspect.
• Keeping an engineering customer updated in direct, technically credible language while the root cause is still being investigated.
• Reviewing a cluster of similar tickets and deciding whether the answer is better documentation, product work, tooling, or a new escalation path.
• Building an internal automation or AI-assisted workflow that removes a repetitive support step.
• Working alongside founders and engineers on how the support function should evolve as enterprise usage grows.

The Environment

This is a small, technically serious infrastructure company operating its own global bare-metal fleet. The environment touches GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Docker, Linux, Firecracker microVMs, distributed systems, large-scale storage, Slack-based customer support, and AI/LLM tooling. You do not need every keyword on day one, but you do need the technical judgment and curiosity to learn the system quickly. The team is intentionally in person. The expectation is five days a week in the New York City or San Francisco office, with normal human flexibility — not a badge-scanning culture, but a genuine belief that building this function is better done together.

The Honest Part

The support organization is early. Some processes will be incomplete. The right escalation path may not exist yet. You will sometimes need to solve the immediate customer problem and then step back to design a better system so the same problem is handled more cleanly next time. You will also be talking with highly technical customers. They will expect direct answers, visible ownership, and communication that respects their time. This is not a role for someone who wants to route tickets and stay far away from the underlying technology.

You'll Probably Thrive Here If

• You have five or more years in technical support engineering, developer support, product support, customer reliability, or a similarly hands-on technical role.
• You have supported a product used by developers, infrastructure teams, data teams, or other engineers.
• You have seen a genuinely strong support organization at scale and understand what made it work.
• You can point to processes, systems, automations, escalations, or operating standards you personally improved — not just inherited.
• You enjoy technical debugging and can explain complex issues without becoming vague, defensive, or overly polished.
• You bring energy to customer conversations, even when the issue is repetitive or the customer is frustrated.
• You want real ownership and are comfortable building while the playbook is still being written.

This Probably Isn't For You If

• Most of your support experience has been internal help desk or nontechnical end-user support.
• You want a mature organization where every process, boundary, and escalation path has already been decided.
• You are more interested in customer success or account management than hands-on technical diagnosis.
• You prefer fully remote work.
• You are not particularly interested in developer tools, infrastructure, or understanding how the product actually works.

What Makes It Worth Considering

You would be joining at the point where support becomes strategically important, but before the function has hardened into layers and bureaucracy. The company has real customer traction, a technically ambitious platform, experienced systems founders, and a small team where this hire can materially influence how enterprise customers experience the product. This is a chance to take everything you have learned about excellent technical support and use it to build something better from the beginning.

Compensation and Logistics

• $160,000–$180,000 base salary, with potential flexibility for an exceptional fit.
• Competitive equity and full benefits.
• Full-time position with two planned hires.
• Five days per week in the New York City or San Francisco office.
• Eligible visa transfers may be considered; new visa petitions are not available.

A Note From Epic Placements

This is one of those roles where "support" undersells the job. The strongest person will be technical enough to earn credibility with engineers, operational enough to build the function, and human enough to make a difficult customer moment feel well handled. We will give you the straightforward version of the opportunity — what is compelling, what is unfinished, and what the team will expect — and let you decide whether it fits.