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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Experience Manager, Technical Support Engineer

💰 $ - $

Technical SupportCustomer ExperienceEngineering Leadership

🎯 Role Definition

The Experience Manager, Technical Support Engineer is a hybrid technical-leadership role responsible for delivering exceptional customer experiences through high-quality technical support, escalation management, team coaching, process optimization, and cross-functional collaboration. This role owns escalations, drives incident response and root cause analysis (RCA), defines SLAs and operational metrics (MTTD/MTTR), and continuously improves support tooling, knowledge base, and onboarding processes to reduce time-to-resolution and increase customer satisfaction (CSAT and NPS).

Key search terms: Technical Support Manager, Support Engineering, Escalation Manager, Incident Commander, Customer-Facing Engineer, L2/L3 Support, Cloud Support, Troubleshooting, Observability, Knowledge Management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Technical Support Engineer with strong escalation history and mentoring experience.
  • Systems Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) transitioning into customer-facing support leadership.
  • Customer Success Engineer or Product Support Lead with technical domain expertise.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Manager / Director of Technical Support or Customer Experience.
  • Head of Support Operations or VP, Customer Success/Support.
  • Technical Program Manager for Incident Response and Reliability.

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager (technical product or platform).
  • Customer Success Manager or Solutions Architect.
  • Reliability Engineering or Observability Team Lead.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead and manage a team of technical support engineers (L2/L3), including hiring, mentoring, performance reviews, career development, and workload planning to ensure both high team engagement and consistent high-quality customer outcomes.
  • Own the escalation path and incident management lifecycle for high-impact customer incidents: triage, coordinate cross-functional response, communicate timelines and status to customers and stakeholders, and ensure timely resolution within SLA.
  • Serve as the primary point of contact for strategic and technical customer escalations, conducting deep-dive technical troubleshooting, reproducing customer issues, and coordinating engineering fixes or workarounds.
  • Define, monitor, and report on key support metrics (MTTD, MTTR, SLA compliance, CSAT, NPS, backlog age) and use data to drive continuous improvement in support processes and staffing models.
  • Lead post-incident reviews and root cause analysis (RCA), ensuring clear remediation plans, preventive action items, and follow-through across product, QA, and infrastructure teams to eliminate recurrence.
  • Design and optimize technical support processes: tiering model (L1/L2/L3), escalation matrix, on-call rotations, incident commander playbooks, and runbooks that scale with product and customer growth.
  • Build and maintain a searchable knowledge base, technical documentation, and standardized troubleshooting guides to reduce repeat incidents and enable faster onboarding of new support engineers.
  • Implement and champion observability and monitoring best practices (logs, metrics, traces, alerts) with product and SRE teams to accelerate fault detection and root cause isolation for customer issues.
  • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, QA, and DevOps to provide product feedback loops, prioritize bug fixes based on customer impact, and ensure release readiness with supportability considerations.
  • Drive automation of repetitive support tasks via tooling, scripts, integrations with ticketing systems (e.g., Zendesk, Jira, ServiceNow), runbook automation, and self-service diagnostics to reduce ticket volume and improve resolution times.
  • Establish and enforce SLAs and operational level agreements (OLAs), including escalation SLAs and communication expectations for internal stakeholders and customers.
  • Manage on-call and after-hours support programs, ensuring proper handoffs, escalation coverage, and adherence to incident response protocols.
  • Lead customer-facing technical reviews, QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews), and executive escalations by presenting technical findings, remediation plans, and roadmap commitments clearly and credibly.
  • Develop and deliver technical training programs for support engineers and customer teams to close skill gaps in areas such as cloud platforms, networking, databases, and application observability.
  • Drive capacity planning and workforce forecasting by analyzing ticket trends, product roadmap changes, and platform health to ensure the support organization is properly scaled.
  • Manage vendor and third-party relationships (cloud providers, ISVs, managed services) relevant to customer incidents and coordinate fixes or escalations with external partners.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives to reduce incident recurrence, ticket reassignments, and mean time to acknowledge by applying Lean/Kaizen methods to support workflows.
  • Act as an advocate for customers within the organization, translating frequent customer pain points into prioritized product improvements and engineering tickets.
  • Maintain and enforce security, privacy, and compliance practices in support interactions, including protecting customer data and following incident disclosure policies when security-related incidents occur.
  • Create regular operational reviews and dashboards for executive leadership, highlighting trends, risk areas, and suggested investments to improve platform reliability and customer experience.
  • Manage budget and resource allocation for support tools, monitoring systems, and training programs, balancing cost efficiency with service quality.
  • Contribute to hiring strategies, interview processes, and competency frameworks to attract and retain top support engineering talent with the necessary technical and customer-facing skills.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Partner with Marketing and Documentation teams to produce FAQs, troubleshooting videos, and knowledge articles that reduce time-to-first-solution for customers.
  • Participate in product roadmap planning sessions to ensure supportability, observability, and operational readiness are factored into releases.
  • Coach and mentor junior engineers on customer communication, technical writing, and best practices for remote troubleshooting.
  • Maintain internal training and certification programs to standardize skillsets across global support teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep technical troubleshooting across networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers), operating systems (Linux/Unix), and application stacks.
  • Proficient with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) including services commonly used by customers (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, Cloud SQL, Kubernetes/EKS/GKE/AKS).
  • Strong knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and experience debugging containerized applications in production.
  • Experience with observability tools and platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stacks) to instrument and troubleshoot incidents.
  • SQL and database troubleshooting skills for relational (Postgres, MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis, Cassandra) systems.
  • Familiarity with RESTful APIs, authentication (OAuth, JWT), and integration debugging (API gateways, proxies).
  • Practical scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to create diagnostic tools and automate support tasks.
  • Experience with ticketing and issue-tracking systems (Zendesk, Jira, ServiceNow) and building automation or workflows within them.
  • Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and release management to coordinate support during deployments.
  • Security and compliance awareness: incident disclosure, data protection, role-based access control, and basic security incident triage.
  • Ability to read and interpret logs, traces, metrics, and error stacks to isolate root causes quickly.
  • Familiarity with SLA/OLA design, support cost modeling, and capacity planning methodologies.

Soft Skills

  • Strong customer empathy and ability to communicate complex technical issues in clear, non-technical terms to executives and customers.
  • Leadership and people management: coaching, feedback, conflict resolution, and career development.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.
  • Calm, decisive incident commander mindset under pressure with strong prioritization skills.
  • Analytical thinker with a metrics-driven, continuous improvement approach.
  • Effective written communication for knowledge articles, incident reports, and executive summaries.
  • Mentoring and teaching ability to transfer knowledge to junior engineers and global teams.
  • Negotiation skills to manage customer expectations, internal priorities, and resource constraints.
  • Time management and the ability to juggle multiple high-priority incidents simultaneously.
  • Change management: ability to roll out process and tooling changes while maintaining operational stability.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, or MBA with technical experience is a plus.
  • Professional certifications (e.g., AWS/Azure/GCP certifications, ITIL, Certified Kubernetes Administrator) are advantageous.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Information Security

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in technical support, systems engineering, SRE, or related roles with progressive responsibility; 2–4 years in people or team leadership preferred.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated experience managing technical support teams at scale, handling enterprise customer escalations, and owning incident processes.
  • Track record of improving operational metrics (reduced MTTR/MTTD, improved CSAT), building knowledge bases, and implementing automation/tools that reduce cost-to-serve.
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