Support Engineer

An overview of this role

Support Engineering at GitLab isn’t just a title - you will be embedded within the Engineering department and will truly operate in an environment where Support and Engineering meet. You’ll interact with customers daily as they encounter the difficult edge cases of running GitLab in complex environments. In the space of a day, you might be doing behind the scenes work of a Linux administrator troubleshooting performance problems by using strace on a particular process, interacting with the Product team to ensure that steps in a bug report are reproducible, or interacting with the Engineering team itself by diving deep into our codebase and putting together a merge request to actually fix a customer issue.

That’s not all though - you’d equally be invited to contribute to the source code, improve our documentation, and help build out more efficient support processes in our issue tracker. We want to live in a world where everyone can contribute, and as a member of the support team, there are no barriers to using your skills to improve the experience of our users and customers.

Some examples of our projects:

• A solution to capture the state of a customer’s server for easier troubleshooting
• A functionality to ChatOps to make it easier to identify user accounts on GitLab.com

What you’ll do

• Support a mix of Self-managed and GitLab.com (SaaS) customers and resolve their issues via Zendesk tickets, merge requests, email and video conferencing
• Collaborate with our Product , Development , Infrastructure , Customer Success and Sales Teams to build new features and fix bugs, define and shape the product goals, roadmap, priorities, and strategy
• Create and update documentation based on customer interactions
• Collaborate with Support team members (through Pairing Sessions ) and other GitLab team members (for example: as a Support Stable Counterpart )
• Participate in regular rotations for weekday and weekend on-call coverage (daytime only), providing emergency support to our Self-managed and SaaS customers, or working with our SaaS Production team to coordinate incident communications
• Participate in our hiring processes by reviewing applications and assessments, and by participating in interviews.

What you’ll bring

• Experience in, and passion for managing customer facing 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
• Excellent Linux systems administration knowledge ( LFCE or RHCE equivalent knowledge )
• Ability to use scripting languages (preferably Ruby or Bash) , and MVC frameworks (preferably Ruby on Rails)
• Experience with Git and CI/CD
• Expertise in writing support content
• Ability to communicate complex technical topics to customers and coworkers of varying technical skill level
• Familiarity with DevOps methodologies and technologies like Serverless and Kubernetes
• Understand a range of different GitLab implementations, and how service interruptions impact the customer.

About the team

The Support team is distributed all over the world across AMER, EMEA, and APAC regions. Support Engineers work on Support Tickets and helping GitLab’s customers, but they also dig into the code and logs to find out why something is not working as expected. The Collaboration here at GitLab is extraordinary and exciting - Support Engineers solve complex problems together and participate in regular pairing sessions and 1:1s, as well as coffee chats and Slack conversations that help them stay connected. Team members are given the ability to structure their shift the way it best suits their private life while maintaining our ability to address customer issues.

Thanks to our Transparency value, you can see what we are working on in our Support Team page. Additionally, you can see our company roadmap and listen to some of our meetings.