Support Engineer

Job Description

This Support Engineer position is 100% remote.A brief overview GitLab is building an open source, single application for the entire software development lifecycle from project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security.We ended 2019 with a team of 68 Support staff. Right now, we re in a period of growth and are quickly increasing the size of the Support team in step with the number of GitLab employees which broke 1000 in 2019 as well.At GitLab, we live and breathe open source principles. This means our entire handbook is online, and with a few clicks, you can find the details of future releases , check out our past releases , and see some of the customers you d be supporting while working here .Support Engineering at GitLab isn t just a title - those who occupy this role are embedded within the Engineering department and 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 improve our documentation, help build out more efficient support processes in our issue tracker, and dive into the cutting edge technologies that will define how we will do work tomorrow. 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.What you can expect in a Support Engineer role at GitLab: 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: Youve got the personality

• youre 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.

Youre 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, youve 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 its like to be on-call and can jump into a complex situation and make sense of and communicate clearly to stakeholders whats going on.
• youre comfortable using support platforms such as ZenDesk and Salesforce.

Youve 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 youre 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.

Youll 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.

What it s like to work here at GitLab: The culture here at GitLab is something we re incredibly proud of. Because GitLabbers are currently located in over 60 different countries, you ll spend your time collaborating with kind, talented, and motivated colleagues from across the globe. Some of the benefits you ll be entitled to vary by the region or country you re in. However, all GitLabbers are fully remote and receive a no ask, must tell paid-time-off policy, where we don t count the number of days you take off annually. You can work incredibly flexible hours, enabled by our asynchronous approach to communication. We ll also help you set up your home office environment , pay for your membership to a co-working space, and contribute to the travel costs associated with meeting other GitLab employees across the world.Also, every year or so, we ll invite you to our Contribute event .Our hiring process for this Support Engineer position typically follows five stages. The details of this process and the compensation for this role can be found in our hiring process .,

Keyskills :
networkingopen source softwaresoftware development life cycleoperating systemslantroubleshootingmvc framework