Senior Support Engineer

Region: North America, all regions

[[JD_HEADING:The Role

SDVI’s]]

Support Engineering team gets to the bottom of software problems. Support Engineers work with the rest of Engineering to find the root cause of defects found in Rally and implement fixes. They also work with front-line support and customer solutions team members to help diagnose and streamline how our customers configure and use Rally, so their media supply chains can keep content moving.

You’re a software developer at your core, applying those skills to production operations. As a Senior Support Engineer, you’ll be a primary owner of production issues, resolve nearly anything escalated to the team, and lead root cause analysis through to follow-up work. You’ll also help the rest of the team get better at all of it.

What You’ll

Work On

• Triage and resolve nearly all issues escalated to the team, including those in live customer environments
• Act as a primary owner of production issues, and see them through to completion
• Lead root cause analysis, including defining and assigning follow-up work
• Coordinate debugging between developers and support teams
• Keep customers, engineers, and management informed as issues progress, in terms each of them can act on
• Work with engineers through the design, implementation, and deployment of fixes
• Own and improve our support playbooks so new teammates can get up to speed on their own
• Work with Engineering to build monitoring tools to raise awareness of environment conditions
• Collaborate with and mentor other support engineers
• Occasionally help with test automation and tooling
• Take part in a paid after-hours on-call rotation with the Support Engineering and DevOps teams

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 days. You’re handling escalated customer issues on your own, can trace a problem across Rally’s services, have joined the on-call rotation, and have led at least one root cause analysis.
• First year. You’re a primary owner of production issues for a major area of Rally, recurring issues get resolved faster because of the playbooks and monitoring you’ve improved, and other support engineers come to you for guidance.

What You’ll Bring

• Extensive experience in software support or development, with a track record of resolving the hardest problems others escalate to you
• Ability and desire to quickly learn the ins and outs of highly complex systems
• Strong Python skills
• Experience working with single-page web applications, microservice-based systems, cloud-hosted systems, REST APIs, and relational databases
• Experience with a mainstream cloud platform, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience leading incident response and root cause analysis
• Curiosity that keeps you digging until you understand why something broke, and the discipline to learn new systems in depth
• Clear communication with customers and engineers, especially under pressure
• The ability to explain deeply technical topics to non-technical audiences, and to adjust how you communicate for customers, management, or peers

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with professional media formats, such as codecs, container formats, and metadata, and how media supply chains use them
• Experience building monitoring or alerting tools
• Experience with SQL, JavaScript, New Relic Query Language (NRQL), or Splunk
• Experience mentoring other engineers

If you don’t meet every point above, we’d still like to hear from you.

How We

Work

• We’re small and distributed. Most of our collaboration happens over Slack and Zoom, across time zones. You’ll own what you build, and you’ll work closely with people outside your immediate team.
• Engineers stay close to customers. You’ll hear directly from the people using what you build. When something goes wrong in production, the team that owns the code helps fix it.
• We dig for root causes. When something breaks, we find out why instead of patching the symptom and moving on.
• We ship, then refine. We work in short sprints and improve things over time instead of waiting for a perfect first version.

How We Use AI

AI coding agents are part of how we work every day, and we invest in getting good at using them. We’re also careful with them, because customers run their content operations on Rally. We’re tracking industry trends and innovations, but using our day-to-day experiences to separate signal from noise.

Our engineers are still responsible for the code they ship. We still expect them to explain and defend its architecture and intent, even as more is built with an agent’s help. We judge work by its quality, not its quantity.

This role is not a fit for someone who would rather not use AI tools, or who is used to shipping generated changes they couldn’t explain. It probably is a fit for someone who knows where these tools go wrong and how to achieve quality with speed.

Logistics

• This is a remote role. You should be based in the United States, and either in the Eastern time zone or able to commit to working East Coast hours
• This role includes a paid after-hours on-call rotation
• Occasional travel may be required, but is not core to this role
• Interview process: introductory call, AI proficiency interview, team technical interview, interview project, interview project presentation, and founders interview

Compensation and Benefits

Salary range $140,000 to $185,000

Salary range represents the expected range for this position and is based on a number of factors, including location, and will vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges are US-applicable only.

You Should Be Interested in SDVI Because:

• You are looking for your next big challenge
• You are looking for a company that welcomes your talent virtually
• You want teammates you can learn from, and who will learn from you
• You want to be part of a team that respects individuals and their work
• You consider the big picture and your contribution to it

SDVI offers a comprehensive benefits package including competitive salary, medical, vision, dental, 401(k) match, and stock options in a stimulating and rewarding distributed work environment.

SDVI is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity in our workforce. We maintain a courteous work environment that recognizes the dignity and worth of each employee. SDVI respects the individual needs of employees and is an equal-opportunity employer.