Principal Support Engineer

This is not a traditional support role: it is a high-impact position for someone with strong ownership that enjoys exploring how systems work, solving ambiguous problems, influencing product direction and translating complex technical problems into clear, actionable paths forward for both customers and internal stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Perform hands‑on technical troubleshooting using logs, traces, APIs, data and system behavior to isolate issues and define actionable resolution paths.

• Lead high-severity and strategic customer escalations, providing authoritative technical direction and timely communication.

• Drive vendor ticket escalations, ensuring SLA adherence and proactive follow‑ups with Microsoft, Adobe, AWS, Cisco, and others.

• Collaborate with Engineering to deliver root-cause fixes, submit detailed technical findings, validate permanent resolutions and establish preventive controls.

• Partner with Product to identify platform gaps, recurring customer pain points, and areas for workflow or UX improvement.

• Explore new features, systems, APIs, workflows, and integration patterns to determine their operational and customer impact.

• Define operational readiness criteria, support models, observability requirements, escalation paths, and knowledge needs.

• Lead hypercare for new launches and ensure a controlled, measurable transition into Operations and Support.

• Identify adoption, stability, usability, and supportability risks before and after release.

• Map legacy processes and platforms, identify dependencies and gaps, and support modernization initiatives.

• Analyze customer and agent journeys to identify friction, unnecessary complexity, and opportunities to improve UX and CX.

• Analyze MTTR performance, SLA trends, and operational bottlenecks; publish weekly metrics and insights.

• Identify automation opportunities and collaborate with internal teams to enhance Zendesk workflows and self-service deflection.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years in Technical Support Engineering, Escalations, SRE, Solutions Architecture, Technical Business Analysis, Product Operations, or advanced Support Engineering.

• Ability to understand unfamiliar systems quickly and map technical and operational dependencies.

• Understanding of product lifecycle, release readiness, hypercare, and production transition.

• Expertise with Datadog (log search, traces, monitors, dashboards) is a plus.

• Strong REST API troubleshooting using Postman, cURL, authentication flows, and JSON payload analysis.

• Experience diagnosing distributed systems, integrations, and SaaS platform behavior.

• Proven ability to interface with strategic enterprise customers and communicate complex technical issues clearly.

• Hands‑on experience with vendor escalation processes and SLA governance.

• Strong working knowledge of MTTR, incident management, and technical support KPIs.

• Curiosity and creativity in discovering new technical capabilities and alternative ways of solving problems.

Performance Expectations & KPIs

• Successful operational readiness and transition of assigned initiatives.

• Hypercare exit based on agreed stability, adoption, documentation, and support-readiness criteria.

• Reduction in repeated incidents and customer-impacting defects.

• Product, workflow, UX, or CX improvements identified and adopted.

• Quality and impact of feature requests, technical findings, and solution proposals.

• Improvements in observability, automation, self-service, and operational efficiency.

• Reduction in MTTR and escalation dependency for targeted problem areas.

• Knowledge transfer and capability uplift across Operations and Support teams.

What makes this role different

This role goes beyond resolving tickets. You will work at the intersection of technology, product, operations, and customer experience. You may lead the resolution of a critical incident one day, assess a new platform capability the next, and then define how a new service should be monitored, supported, and introduced globally. It is an opportunity to influence both how technology is built and how customers and operational teams experience it.