Manager, Customer Engineering

Cortex is an Engineering Operations Platform that helps organizations improve operational maturity and reduce developer friction. The Manager of Customer Engineering will lead and grow the Customer Engineering team while remaining hands-on with complex technical issues, balancing people management and technical ownership. This role is responsible for team performance, technical escalations, quality assurance, process improvements, and cross-functional collaboration with Engineering and Product teams.

Responsibilities:

• Hire, onboard, and develop the Customer Engineers
• Set clear goals and growth plans for the team
• Own performance management, which includes calibration and feedback
• Manage team capacity and workload distribution across tickets and projects
• Step into complex tickets and escalations
• Serve as the final technical escalation point when a Senior CE needs backup
• Draft, review, and merge PRs where applicable
• QA a sample of tickets regularly to ensure resolution quality, tone and adherence to playbooks
• Track recurring issues and support trends across the team to update processes, tooling or documentation
• Report on team health metrics (resolution time, ticket volume, escalation rates) to leadership
• Build and maintain the team’s operating rhythm - ticket triage, escalation paths, on-call coverage
• Own troubleshooting playbooks, onboarding guides, and internal documentation
• Identify where AI or automation can reduce manual ticket work and drive adoption
• Represent Customer Engineering in planning and prioritization discussions with Engineering and Product
• Advocate for customer-driven product improvements based on patterns the team surfaces

Requirements:

• 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role (Customer Engineering, Technical Support, Solutions Engineering, or similar) with hands-on experience troubleshooting production issues for enterprise customers
• 2+ years directly managing a technical team, with accountability for hiring, performance management, and career development
• Comfortable reading code across our stack, with a habit of continuously learning the product deeply enough to identify root cause and hold credible technical conversations with Engineering
• Working knowledge of Git-based workflows, CI/CD, and standard engineering practices (code review, testing, deployment)
• Track record of using ticket and support trend data to drive concrete process, tooling, or documentation improvements
• Experience partnering cross-functionally with Engineering and Product, translating customer patterns into actionable feedback
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable serving as the final technical escalation point on high-stakes customer issues
• Experience in a B2B SaaS or developer tooling company, ideally supporting technical personas (engineers, platform teams, SREs)
• Experience building or improving support tooling, automation, or AI-assisted workflows
• Experience scaling a support or customer engineering team through a growth stage