Customer Support Manager

Customer Support Manager (AMER Technical Support Engineering)

Manage the AMER Technical Support Engineering team within a global follow-the-sun support organization. Own the quality and reliability of the escalation path from customer issues to engineering resolution, ensuring fast, accurate handoffs and rigorous engineering outcomes alongside an exceptional customer experience.

Responsibilities

• Escalation Operations

  • Own the L2/L3 escalation boundary: define routing criteria, review escalation quality, and reduce unnecessary L3 load without increasing customer time-to-resolution.
  • Maintain and improve escalation intake workflows (triage standards, ticket hygiene, and engineering handoff artifacts).
  • Track escalation health metrics and report trends; identify engineering capacity risks before they become bottlenecks.
  • Run escalation retrospectives to close the loop on resolution patterns and feed learnings into product and documentation.

• Team Development

  • Manage, coach, and develop the AMER Technical Support Engineering team with an emphasis on technical depth and debugging rigor.
  • Operate career leveling for IC growth (L1–L6), maintain promotion bar, and ensure actionable growth plans.
  • Coordinate AMER handoffs with APAC and EMEA peer managers to maintain follow-the-sun coverage and SLA performance.
  • Proactively close skill gaps (especially Linux fundamentals, container security, Kubernetes ecosystem).

• Tooling and Automation

  • Own the support tooling stack, including ticketing systems, AI-assisted triage, and deflection tooling.
  • Partner with engineering to build and maintain LLM-assisted workflows for escalation intake, ticket quality review, and knowledge retrieval.
  • Drive adoption of AI tooling while managing risk and ensuring appropriate automation leverage.
  • Use support data to surface product quality signals and operational trends to engineering and product leadership.

• Cross-Functional Execution

  • Serve as the primary interface between Technical Support Engineering and product engineering for escalated issues.
  • Work with Customer Success and GTM collaboratively without letting them define support quality standards or escalation criteria.
  • Contribute to product feedback loops with reproducible, well-scoped bug reports and actionable pattern analysis.

Requirements

• 4+ years managing technical support engineers or software engineers in a production-facing environment.
• Proven ability to design and operate escalation processes.
• Strong technical credibility in the Linux ecosystem (comfortable reading logs, understanding container runtimes, and partnering with engineering).
• Strong written communication for escalation summaries, retrospective reports, and leadership-facing metrics briefs.

Nice-to-haves / Focus Areas (from role emphasis)

• Deep knowledge in container security and the Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Experience adopting AI-assisted triage and LLM-supported workflows in support operations.