An overview of this role

Support Engineering at GitLab isn’t just a title - you will be embedded within the Engineering department and will 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 contribute to the source code, improve our documentation, and help build out more efficient support processes in our issue tracker. 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.

Some examples of our projects: 

• A tool to quickly analyze strace output
• A solution to capture the state of a customer’s server for easier troubleshooting
• A functionality to ChatOps to make it easier to identify user accounts on GitLab.com

What you’ll do  

• Collaborate with Public Sector organizations and United States Government agencies in order to support, maintain, and resolve issues in their GitLab environments via Zendesk tickets, merge requests, email and video conferencing
• Collaborate with our Product, Development, Infrastructure, Customer Success and Sales Teams to build new features and fix bugs, define and shape the product goals, roadmap, priorities, and strategy
• Create and update documentation based on customer interactions
• Collaborate with Support team members (through Pairing Sessions) and other GitLab team members (for example: as a Support Stable Counterpart)
• Participate in regular rotations for weekday and weekend on-call coverage providing emergency support to our Self-managed customers
• Participate in our hiring processes by reviewing applications and assessments, and by participating in interviews.

 

What you’ll bring 

• Experience in and passion for managing customer facing 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
• Excellent Linux systems administration knowledge (LFCE or RHCE equivalent knowledge)
• Ability to use scripting languages (preferably Ruby or Bash), and MVC frameworks (preferably Ruby on Rails)
• Experience with Git and CI/CD
• Expertise in writing support content
• Ability to communicate complex technical topics to customers and coworkers of varying technical skill level
• Familiarity with DevOps methodologies and technologies like Openshift and Kubernetes
• Understanding and/or experience with common information security and compliance concepts and controls (i.e. DISA STIG, SELinux, etc)
• US Citizen, living and working in the United States, willing and able to achieve US federal security clearance if needed

 

About the team

The US Federal Support team collaborates with public sector organizations and United States government agencies through the US Federal Support portal to support, maintain, and resolve issues in their GitLab environments. They also dig into the code and logs to find out why something is not working as expected.

There are a number of challenges that are unique when it comes to supporting the customer environments that an engineer may encounter in the Federal space. Some of those challenges may include highly sanitized and redacted troubleshooting information, inability to screenshare or provide screenshots, etc. In addition to restrictive environments, some of the customers served by the Federal support team employ bleeding edge technologies and employ strict compliance measures on the systems which can further complicate troubleshooting efforts.

The Collaboration here at GitLab is extraordinary and exciting - Support Engineers solve complex problems together and participate in regular pairing sessions and 1:1s, as well as coffee chats and Slack conversations that help them stay connected. Team members are given the ability to structure their shift the way it best suits their private life while maintaining our ability to address customer issues.

Thanks to our Transparency value, you can see what we are working on in our Support Team page. Additionally, you can see our company roadmap and listen to some of our meetings. 

 

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• All remote, asynchronous work environment
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and development budget 
• Parental leave 
• Home office support

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.