This Support Engineer position is 100% remote.

The GitLab Customer Support Department is a 150+ person globally distributed team that consists of Support Engineering, Support Operations, and Support Management. 

The GitLab Support Team provides technical support to GitLab Saas and Self-Managed customers.

Support Engineer

The Support Engineer is a grade 6.

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.

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:

• resolve customer issues via email and video conferencing.
• support a mix of Self-managed and GitLab.com (SaaS) customers.
• collaborate with our Product and Development Teams to build new features and fix bugs.
• create and update documentation based on customer interactions.
• work hard to solve customer problems while delighting them along the way.
• participate in regular rotations for weekday and weekend on-call coverage (daytime only), providing emergency support to our Self-managed and SaaS customers, or working with our SaaS Production team to coordinate incident communications.
• work alongside Product Managers to define and shape the product goals, roadmap, priorities, and strategy based on your frontline knowledge of customer needs.
• continually research and learn the current and future best practices of using GitLab.
• participate in our hiring processes by reviewing applications and assessments, and by participating in interviews.
• suggest and implement improvements to Support workflows.

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:

• 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

Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply. 

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 2+ years of experience in a support or other service-oriented customer facing role.
• within the last 5 years, you've 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 have experience being 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, or you're 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 excellent Linux systems administration knowledge (LFCE or RHCE equivalent knowledge).

You'll be able to thrive at GitLab

• 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.

What it’s like to work here at GitLab:

We are very proud of the culture here at GitLab. Because GitLab team members 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 GitLab team members 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 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.

How you'll grow in the role:

Support career progression is documented in Engineer Career Development - Support Department.

Career Ladder

For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.

How you'll be measured

Performance Indicators

Support Engineers have the following job-family Performance Indicators.

• Customer satisfaction with Support
• Service Level Agreement
• Ticket deflection through documentation updates
  
  

Hiring Process

Here are some tips for interviewing for Customer Support. 

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.

• Technical assessment.
• 30-minute screening call with a Recruiter.
• 90-Minute Technical Interview with a member of 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 Panel Interview with a Support Engineering Manager & one other member of the team.
• 60-Minute Interview with a Senior Manager or Director of Support.
• Reference Checks.
• Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer. Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 3,000 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
4. Transparency: Over 2,300 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
9. Work/Life Harmony: Non-linear workday, Family and Friends Days
10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.