Customer Support Manager

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, helping organizations build faster and stay compliant through secure software. The Customer Support Manager will oversee the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, ensuring quality and reliability in the escalation process while enhancing customer experience and team development.

Responsibilities:

• Own the L2/L3 escalation boundary: define routing criteria, review escalation quality, and drive down unnecessary L3 load without increasing customer time-to-resolution
• Maintain and improve escalation intake workflows including triage standards, ticket hygiene, and handoff artifacts for engineering partners
• Track escalation health metrics and report on trends to engineering leadership; identify capacity risks in eng teams before they become bottlenecks
• Run escalation retrospectives to close the loop on resolution patterns and feed signal back into product and documentation
• Manage, coach, support and develop the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, with direct attention to technical depth and debugging rigor
• Operate career leveling frameworks for IC growth (L1 through L6); hold bar on promotions and ensure growth plans are actionable
• Coordinate AMER handoffs with APAC and EMEA peer managers to maintain follow-the-sun coverage quality: clear ownership at every handoff, with uninterrupted SLA performance
• Identify and close skill gaps proactively, particularly in Linux fundamentals, container security, and Kubernetes ecosystems
• Own the support tooling stack including ticketing systems, AI-assisted triage, and deflection tooling
• Partner with engineering to build and maintain LLM-assisted workflows for escalation intake, ticket quality review, and knowledge retrieval
• Drive adoption of AI tooling across the team; know where automation adds leverage and where it introduces risk
• Use support data to surface product quality signals and operational trends to engineering and product leadership
• Serve as the primary interface between Technical Support Engineering and product engineering teams for escalated issues
• Maintain a functional relationship with Customer Success and GTM without allowing those teams to define support quality standards or escalation criteria
• Contribute to product feedback loops through reproducible, well-scoped bug reports and actionable pattern analysis

Requirements:

• 4+ years managing technical support engineers or software engineers in a production-facing environment
• Demonstrated ability to design and operate an escalation process: not just follow one
• Technical credibility in the Linux ecosystem; comfortable reading logs, understanding container runtimes, and engaging with engineering teams as an active peer
• Strong written communication; capable of writing clear escalation summaries, retrospective reports, and leadership-facing metrics briefs
• Track record of developing engineers through real feedback, structured growth plans, and calibrated performance conversations
• Comfort operating in a globally distributed support org with peer managers in other regions; strong handoff discipline
• Experience with container security, DevSecOps tooling, Kubernetes, or open source software ecosystems
• Familiarity with Zendesk or similar ticketing platforms at an operational level (workflows, configuration, reporting)
• Exposure to AI-assisted support tooling, LLM-based triage, or knowledge retrieval systems