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 work 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 as a Support Engineer:

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

You should apply for the position of Support Engineer 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 handoff 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 levels.
• you have excellent Ruby on Rails knowledge and are fluent in 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.

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