Principal Support Engineer

Role Overview

• Proactively oversee the Zendesk queue, ensuring SLAs are consistently met and stepping in on critical, high-impact escalations.
• Act as a point of escalation for systemic issues, leading incident resolution and partnering with cross-functional teams
• escalations would first come to you before going to Product.
• Work with Pod Leads to identify and resolve recurring support workflow challenges.
• Guide triage practices to ensure fast, accurate issue isolation across the team.
• Lead deep technical investigations, including complex debugging and source code analysis.
• Identify and implement process improvements, automation, and AI tools to improve operational efficiency and reduce response/resolution time.
• Maintain ticket quality across the board, ensuring product teams receive actionable, high-quality submissions.
• Contribute bug fixes, tooling, or workarounds to the codebase to unblock customers.
• Anticipate platform-wide issues and proactively work to prevent them through architecture awareness and preventive strategies.
• Ensure critical knowledge is documented and shared, maintaining a robust Zendesk knowledge base, debugging guides, and external documentation.
• Adhere to escalation SLAs and act as a key player in the on-call rotation to maintain 24/7 global support.
• Take ownership of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations.
• Regularly review team metrics to identify improvement areas and help set team-wide goals and focus areas.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to drive product-level changes based on support data and customer impact.
• Represent the Customer Success Engineering team in company-wide strategic initiatives, shaping the future of post-sales support.
• Support the evolution of internal support policies (e.g., SLAs, escalation procedures, “won’t fix” standards).
• Serve as a trusted, senior post-sales contact for high-value customers, ensuring a seamless and proactive support experience.
• Champion initiatives that improve the customer journey, including better routing, issue ownership, and self-service capabilities.
• Take an active leadership role, ensuring timely and technically accurate responses.
• Advocate for the voice of the customer in internal planning, identifying feature needs or systemic weaknesses from real-world usage.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortems for major incidents from a customer success position, ensuring long-term resolution and process adaptation.
• Drive ticket volume reduction by identifying recurring pain points and proposing durable solutions at a platform or documentation level.
• Play a critical role in evolving support strategy to scale as Tyk grows, influencing structure, tooling, and hiring decisions.

Requirements

• Extensive experience in technical support or success engineering roles, with proven leadership in complex escalations and systemic improvements.
• Strong background in dealing with large Enterprise customers.
• Strong background in an API / APIM driven environment.
• Someone who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty in new technologies. A great senior engineer not only knows the Tyk component/technologies but they often will have to know and set up other technologies that the customer uses, i.e kubernetes, docker, databases, SSO/IDPs etc
• Strong debugging skills—able to read source code and diagnose issues in distributed systems.
• Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to lead without authority, influencing product, engineering, and customer success peers.
• Passion for operational excellence, automation, and scalable support strategies.
• A growth mindset—you lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to continuously improve yourself and those around you.
• Comfort working with different region customers, with willingness to participate in rotational on-call shifts (including weekends).

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems
• Docker
• Kubernetes

Benefits

• Everyone has unlimited paid holidays.
• We have total flexibility in hours, as we believe creativity flows better when our people are given freedom to decide when they are most productive. Everyone is unique after all.
• Employee share scheme
• Generous maternity and paternity leave
• Volunteering Days
• Company retreats
• Employee Wellbeing platform