Support Engineer, APAC

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This Support Engineer position is 100% remote, located in APAC timezones.

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, assessments and 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 (and the lives of your coworkers) easier. Current and past support engineers have:

Requirements

You should apply if:

You've got the personality;

  • you're 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.

You're a support professional;

  • you’ve got 5+ years of support experience.
  • within the last 5 years, you have held a role at one company for at least 2 years.
  • you’re experienced in writing support content.
  • you’ve got experience 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 it's like to be on-call and can jump into a complex situation and make sense of (and communicate clearly to stakeholders) what's going on.
  • you're comfortable using support platforms (such as ZenDesk and Salesforce).

You've 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 level.
  • you have excellent Ruby on Rails knowledge and are fluent on the Rails console.
  • you're more than proficient in working with another MVC framework (Django, Laravel or others) and will be able to pick up Rails quickly (if you don't have direct Rails expereience).
  • you’ve got experience with Git and CI/CD.
  • you've got the additional experience that our areas of focus might require.

You'll 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.

You meet any region-specific criteria;

APAC Region

  • you have excellent written Japanese, Korean or Mandarin.

Support Engineering Areas of Focus

Support Engineers may focus in one of the following areas, so there may be some different requirements depending on where you'll be focusing.

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-practice. 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.

How you'll grow in the role:

Senior Support Engineer

Senior Support Engineers are more experienced engineers who continue to contribute as an individual, but operate equally comfortable at the level of team-enablement. That is, they work at the team level to increase every member's ability to contribute. With the wider focus, the specializations of the Intermediate role begin to disappear.

Generally they meet the following criteria. They:

  • are involved in mentoring team mates on new technologies and new GitLab features.
  • possess expert debugging skills.
  • submit merge requests to resolve GitLab bugs.
  • drive feature requests based on customer interactions.
  • contribute to one or more complementary projects.

A Senior Support Engineer may be interested in exploring Support Management as an alternative at this point. See Engineering Career Development for more detail.

Staff Support Engineer

A Senior Support Engineer will be promoted to Staff Support Engineer when they have demonstrated significant leadership and impact; typically around resolving customer issues. This may involve any type of consistent "above and beyond senior level" performance, for example, a Staff Support Engineer might:

  • regularly submitting merge requests for customer reported/requested GitLab bugs and feature proposals.
  • work across functional groups to deliver on projects relating to customer experience and success.
  • write in-depth documentation and clarify community communications that share knowledge and radiate GitLab's technical strengths.
  • possess the ability to create innovative solutions that push GitLab's technical abilities ahead of the curve.
  • identify significant projects that result in substantial cost savings or revenue.
  • define and solve important architectural issues based on their extensive customer knowledge.

How you'll be measured

Performance Indicators

Support Engineers have the following job-family Performance Indicators.

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

  • Selected candidates may receive a short questionnaire from our Global Recruiters

  • Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with our Global Recruiters

  • Next, candidates will move to the first round of interviews

    • 90 Minute Technical Interview with a member for the Support team.
      • The Technical Interview will involve live break-fix/bug-fix scenarios as well as customer scenarios.  You will need to have access to a terminal with Bash or similar. You will also need to have an SSH key pair installed locally so you can connect to the server. Windows users must have ‘Git Bash for Windows’ installed prior to the call. If the Technical Interview is not passed, the Behavioral Interview will be canceled.
    • 60 Minute Behavioral Interview
  • Next, candidates will move to the second round of interviews

    • 60 Minute Interview with the Director of Support
  • Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

 
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