Principal Support Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Take proactive charge of the Zendesk queue, ensuring that SLAs are consistently achieved while intervening on critical, high-impact escalations.

• Serve as a primary point of escalation for systemic issues, leading incident resolution and collaborating with cross-functional teams - escalations will be directed to you prior to reaching Product.

• Collaborate with Pod Leads to pinpoint and address recurring challenges in support workflows.

• Direct triage practices to guarantee swift and precise issue isolation throughout the team.

• Conduct in-depth technical investigations, including complex debugging and source code analysis.

• Identify and implement process enhancements, automation, and AI tools to boost operational efficiency and decrease response/resolution times.

• Ensure ticket quality is maintained, providing product teams with actionable, high-quality submissions.

• Contribute bug fixes, tools, or workarounds to the codebase to assist customers effectively.

• Anticipate potential platform-wide issues and proactively work to prevent them through architectural awareness and preventive strategies.

• Maintain comprehensive documentation of critical knowledge, ensuring a robust Zendesk knowledge base, debugging guides, and external documentation are available.

• Comply with escalation SLAs and play a vital role in the on-call rotation to provide 24/7 global support.

• Take ownership of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations.

• Regularly assess team metrics to identify areas for improvement and contribute to setting team-wide goals and focus areas.

• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to drive product-level changes based on support data and customer impact.

• Represent the Customer Success Engineering team in company-wide strategic initiatives, influencing the future of post-sales support.

• Aid in the development of internal support policies (e.g., SLAs, escalation procedures, “won’t fix” standards).

• Act as a trusted, senior post-sales contact for high-value customers, ensuring a smooth and proactive support experience.

• Promote initiatives aimed at enhancing the customer journey, including better routing, issue ownership, and self-service capabilities.

• Assume an active leadership role, ensuring timely and technically accurate responses.

• Advocate for customer perspectives in internal planning, identifying feature requirements or systemic weaknesses based on real-world usage.

• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortem reviews for significant incidents from a customer success viewpoint, ensuring long-term resolutions and process adaptations.

• Drive ticket volume reduction by identifying recurring issues and proposing sustainable solutions at the platform or documentation level.

• Play an essential role in evolving the support strategy to scale with Tyk's growth, influencing structure, tooling, and hiring decisions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in technical support or success engineering roles, with a proven track record in managing complex escalations and systemic improvements.

• Strong background in engaging with large Enterprise customers.

• Solid experience in an API / APIM driven environment.

• A willingness to engage deeply with new technologies; an excellent senior engineer not only understands Tyk components/technologies but also adapts to other technologies used by customers, such as Kubernetes, Docker, databases, SSO/IDPs, etc.

• Strong debugging abilities—capable of reading source code and diagnosing issues in distributed systems.

• Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Proven ability to lead without authority, influencing product, engineering, and customer success peers.

• A passion for operational excellence, automation, and scalable support strategies.

• A growth mindset—embodying curiosity, humility, and a desire for continuous self-improvement and enhancement of those around you.

• Comfort in working with customers from different regions, with a willingness to participate in rotational on-call shifts (including weekends).

🏝️ Benefits

• Unlimited paid holidays for all employees.

• Flexible working hours, as we believe creativity thrives when individuals have the freedom to choose their most productive times. Everyone is unique after all.

• Employee share scheme.

• Generous maternity and paternity leave.

• Volunteering days.

• Company retreats.

• Employee wellbeing platform.