SRE Support Engineer - Observability

Role Overview The Observability & Tools Support Engineer provides high-impact technical support for customers of a large technology company’s internal IaaS platform, with a focus on monitoring, alerting, telemetry, and operational tooling. This role spans a wide range of support—from white-glove onboarding and end-to-end customer enablement, to deep technical troubleshooting across Linux, networking, and observability systems (especially Prometheus and AlertManager). You will also contribute to improving the support function itself: strengthening tooling, documentation, workflows, and feedback loops so the service scales. Success depends on excellent troubleshooting, strong written communication, comfort working with highly technical customers, and the maturity to identify patterns and drive operational improvements beyond individual ticket resolution. Business Outcome Become a trusted frontline expert for the customer’s observability ecosystem and operational tooling - delivering fast, accurate support across Slack and tickets, improving monitoring reliability, and reducing incident impact through better triage, troubleshooting, onboarding, and knowledge capture. Success Measures Healthy volume of threads and tickets handled with high-quality outcomes Consistent achievement of time-based SLAs High customer satisfaction through surveys Accurate classification of issue type, severity, and recurring patterns Reduced repeat issues through better docs, tooling, and scalable onboarding What Will Be True When You Succeed Customers can onboard smoothly to monitoring/alerting with minimal friction Monitoring and alerting issues are resolved quickly, with fewer escalations Linux and networking-related incidents reach resolution faster due to strong troubleshooting and clean handoffs Engineering and SRE teams receive clear, actionable feedback based on real customer trends Knowledge base content prevents tickets and accelerates self-service Core Work Units Frontline Support for Observability & Tooling Manage Slack threads and tickets (roughly 50/50) Handle a broad range of customer support: simple issue resolution through end-to-end onboarding Provide clear, structured guidance to highly technical customers Maintain strong attention to detail while managing multiple interactions in parallel Deep-Dive Troubleshooting & Incident Support Troubleshoot, isolate, and resolve monitoring and alerting issues (especially Prometheus + AlertManager) Troubleshoot complex Linux and networking issues (TCP/IP fundamentals required) Support OpenTelemetry, tracing, and telemetry pipelines, including investigation of gaps in signals and instrumentation Drive incidents to resolution in partnership with Engineering/SRE teams Documentation & Knowledge Development Build and maintain customer-facing and internal knowledge base articles Create informational posts for the community support platform Turn repeated issues into reusable guides, checklists, and onboarding playbooks Trend Analysis & Feedback to Engineering Analyze and categorize customer interaction trends Provide accurate, meaningful feedback to Engineering and SRE orgs to improve product/tooling Identify “top offenders” and propose practical fixes (tooling, docs, process, product) Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement Participate in post-mortem reviews and drive follow-through on improvements Contribute meaningfully to team objectives and goals (process, tooling, and service scaling) Bring creativity and discretion to resolve highly complex issues “outside the box” High-Quality Work - what top performance looks like Frontline Support Moves smoothly from triage to deeper analysis without losing the customer Communicates clearly and confidently with technical users Maintains clean follow-ups and thread hygiene even with high context switching Troubleshooting Rapidly isolates issues across monitoring/alerting configs, Linux runtime behavior, and network connectivity Uses structured approaches to incident handling: hypothesis → test → evidence → resolution Produces high-signal writeups that accelerate downstream resolution Documentation & Enablement Documentation is clear enough that customers avoid opening tickets Onboarding flows reduce time-to-value and prevent common misconfigurations Captures “tribal knowledge” quickly and makes it reusable Operational Excellence Obsessing over details: correct severity, accurate tagging, clean timelines, strong handoffs Spots patterns early and proactively proposes improvements that scale support Typical Day / Work Patterns ~50% Slack support, ~50% ticket handling Deep-dive investigations during lower ticket volume periods Documentation writing and lightweight tooling/process improvements when patterns emerge Weekly team review of escalations, themes, and operational improvements High rate of context switching and parallel issue management Required Skills & Experience (Non-Negotiable) Several years supporting highly scalable applications and web services Hands-on experience with open-source observability and cloud-native tooling, including: Kubernetes (and container fundamentals) Prometheus and AlertManager troubleshooting OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing concepts Strong understanding of the Linux operating system (command line, process/network debugging, logs) Good understanding of infrastructure observability principles (signals, alerting strategy, SLO thinking, noise reduction) Good understanding of the TCP/IP suite and practical networking troubleshooting Strong experience troubleshooting ambiguous, multi-layer issues Excellent analytical capability and strong attention to detail Strong written and verbal communication (clear, structured, customer-friendly) Comfortable working with a very technical customer base Passion for Technical Support and a service mindset Nice-to-Haves Experience improving or supporting internal support tooling or workflows (automation, templates, runbooks) Experience operating at scale in a services environment (pattern detection, KPI/SLA awareness, operational process maturity) Familiarity with Grafana, log aggregation, incident tooling, and production support practices Prior SRE or platform support experience Minimum Qualifications 3–7+ years in Technical Support Engineering, SRE support, DevOps, Platform Support, or similar Demonstrated experience supporting distributed systems, IaaS, or cloud platforms Strong Linux, troubleshooting, and customer-facing communication background Evidence of documentation, knowledge-base contributions, and process improvement mindset Disqualifiers: weak Linux fundamentals, inability to troubleshoot systematically, poor written communication, or discomfort supporting highly technical users. What You’ll Love Real technical problem solving with tangible customer impact A role that blends deep troubleshooting with scaling support via docs, tooling, and process High autonomy in a remote-first environment What May Be Challenging High context switching and managing multiple threads in parallel Repeated patterns that require discipline to convert pain into scalable improvements Supporting high-visibility systems where speed and accuracy matter Differentiation Industry: Remote-first, trust-based culture; global team; autonomy; modern systems; meaningful technical challenges Internal: High-impact, customer-facing observability support; direct influence on tooling and process maturity; opportunity to shape scalable support practices #J-18808-Ljbffr Gigster