CIQ - Sr. Customer Support Engineer

• Owning the most complex technical escalations across CIQ's enterprise customer base, from first report through verified root cause to confirmed resolution, including issues that require kernel-level debugging. • Serving as the senior technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and building an understanding of each customer's architecture, workloads, and constraints deep enough to advise them rather than react to them. • Debugging Linux at depth across kernel, user space, systemd, storage, networking, and performance, on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, and cloud infrastructure. • Setting the technical standard for the support organization: reproduction discipline, root-cause rigor, and a clean separation between an observed symptom and an inferred cause in every customer communication. • Mentoring support engineers and reviewing their technical work, so the team's capability grows instead of the hardest tickets permanently routing to one person. • Driving customer-facing defects into Engineering with a reproduction, a diagnosis, and enough context that the fix is unambiguous, then tracking each one through to release. • Contributing automated test coverage that encodes real customer configurations and failure modes, so defects our customers would have hit are caught before a release ships rather than after. • Converting resolved escalations into durable knowledge through knowledge base articles, documentation corrections, and training content, so the next customer with the same question can answer it without opening a ticket. • Using AI-assisted tooling to compress the research, triage, and drafting around support work, while personally reviewing every customer-facing output. The judgment and the published answer remain yours. • Participating in the on-call rotation for critical customer issues and in release readiness reviews for the products you support. • Engaging directly with the Rocky Linux and broader open source communities, upstream and in public forums. • NEEDED TO SUCCEED • Successful candidates will have: • Deep Linux internals expertise spanning kernel and user space, systemd, filesystems and storage, and networking, with the ability to read a stack trace, a core dump, or a performance profile and form a defensible hypothesis from it. • The instinct to reproduce before concluding. You separate what you observed from what you inferred, and you say plainly which is which. • Fluency with the tools of the job: crash and kdump, gdb, strace and ltrace, perf, eBPF and bpftrace, SystemTap, and the RPM build and packaging chain. • Experience with containers and orchestration such as Apptainer, Podman, and Kubernetes, and with virtualization on KVM, QEMU, and libvirt. • Comfort operating across bare metal, on-premises HPC clusters, and the major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. • Automation as a reflex: Bash and Python at a minimum, plus Ansible or an equivalent configuration management tool, and CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. • Excellent written communication. A large share of this role is explaining a difficult technical finding, in writing, to a customer who is under pressure, without overstating what is actually known. • Sound judgment about escalation: knowing when an issue is genuinely critical, and knowing when declaring it critical would cost the team more than it saves. • A willingness to use AI tooling as a force multiplier while owning every word that reaches a customer. • Experience mentoring engineers and improving how a team works, not only what it ships. • A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving to be better attitude.