Cloud Native Support Engineering Manager at Deimos

Job Description

Businesses today are adopting the cloud for improved services to their customers. Our purpose is to guide companies on that journey to drive the adoption of DevSecOps so that our clients can remain ahead of the curve. We have an intense focus on engineering fundamentals, whether Developer and Security Operations, Cloud Native Transformation Strategy or Software Engineering & Architecture. This focus allows us to plan and build a solid foundation for companies, resulting in simplified workflows, stronger systems and true future-proofing. Our services help companies avoid costly mistakes to benefit from scalable, performant, and reliable systems that lie at the end of a cloud-native transformation. We have successfully helped many multinational businesses make their journey to the cloud. These companies now have easy access to their data from anywhere in the world, with security second to none.

About the Role:

We are looking for an experienced Cloud Native Support Engineering Manager to join our Engineering Department and deliver world class support. You will report to the Director of Site Reliability Engineering and work closely with our project management team. As a Cloud Support Engineering Manager, you will play a pivotal role in scaling our rapidly growing Cloud Native Support Engineering team. Initially, you will manage 1-2 direct reports and this number will grow over time. Working closely with the CTO and Engineering Directors, you will drive several key initiatives: identifying process improvements, reporting on key metrics, identifying gaps in our teams, defining job descriptions for roles to fill them, and owning hiring processes to find top support engineering talent and build a diverse and inclusive team. Your team will apply advanced troubleshooting techniques to provide unique solutions to our clients’ individual needs. Your team will not only support our clients, but always play a vital role in supporting the internal operations of the Deimos team. These will include account management, maintaining our cloud accounts, improving our overall security posture and improving our onboarding and offboarding processes. When not working on support or operational tasks, the members of the team will be contributing to the projects they are supporting as Individual Contributors, following the guidance of the engineering team who owns the project(s). The role requires a hands-on individual who not only manages the team, but also acts as a Individual Contributor (IC).

What you will be doing:

Helping hire a team of Support Engineers who are focused on delivering world class technical support. Manage team performance by having continuous quality conversations and formulating personal development and growth paths. Formulate quarterly goals in collaboration with team members. Hold regular 1:1s with team members. Focus on enabling a psychologically safe team environment where all remote team members feel included and connected. Be a positive leader and mentor ensuring team members acquire necessary skills (technical and non-technical), in line with business and personal development needs. Identify, plan and drive projects that improve support-related processes and our customers’ technical support experience. Resolve client and internal issues via email, text and video conferencing. Support a mix of internal and external customers. Apply advanced troubleshooting techniques to provide unique solutions to our client’s individual needs. Work closely with the Deimos Software Engineering and Site Reliability teams to reproduce and resolve client issues. Work closely with Deimos leadership to improve our support engineering processes. Take the role of a TechOps engineer to support internal facing requests. Act as the first point of contact regarding client incidents and outages. Drive customer communication during critical events. Leverage your extensive customer support experience to provide feedback to internal teams on how to improve our services. Write tutorials, how-to videos, and other technical articles for all Deimos engineers to utilise. Maintaining good client relations. Timely writing of incident reports. Continually research and learn the current and future best practices, technologies and architectures of Deimos. Participate in regular rotations for weekday and weekend on-call coverage, providing emergency support to our SLA clients, or working with the team to coordinate incident communications.

What you must have:

Proven work experience as a Cloud Support Engineer, Technical Support Engineer or similar role. Minimum of 2 years of experience leading Support Engineering teams, preferably, you are familiar with building and scaling teams. Strong background in leading remote, distributed teams across geographies with a keen focus on employee development and the achievement of desired results. Experienced in creating and implementing new processes and procedures. Hands-on experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform. Extensive experience networking, analysing, troubleshooting, and providing solutions to difficult technical issues. Familiar with service desk and incident management software. Experienced in writing support oriented content and documentation. Adept in managing cases throughout the entire support lifecycle from initial customer inquiry to triage and reproduction, writing bug reports for hand off to the development team, and case resolution. Knowledgeable of DevOps & Agile methodologies with an appreciation of the value that technologies like Serverless and Kubernetes bring to the software deployment and development process. Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts/topics to customers and coworkers of varying technical skill levels. A fundamental understanding of the Linux operating system. Basic understanding of Cloud Computing concepts.

What is Nice to Have:

Experience working with Gitlab, Atlassian suite (Jira, Service Desk, Opsgenie), Azure, AWS, GCP, Google Workspace and Slack. Experience supporting workloads running in Kubernetes. Experience with coding and or scripting languages.

Key Competencies Required to Thrive in this Role:

Comfortable working as a remote Manager. Lead with humility and learn from team members. Ability to learn new technologies quickly. Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. Critical thinking. Solid dependable team player. Exceptional customer service skills. You enjoy solving many small problems per day.

About you

With Deimos being one of the two moons of Mars, we like to refer to ourselves as “Martians”, who are on a mission together to Mars. For us to achieve our ambitious vision together as a team, our Martians (team members) need to lead at all levels, be self-starters who take initiative, and put their hands up for challenging tasks. A growth mindset is important and we encourage all our Martians to openly share knowledge, support and help each other, ask questions, get creative with new technologies and learn from setbacks.

Becoming a Martian means

Comfortably working and learning from a fully remote, culturally diverse team based predominantly in South Africa and Nigeria. Being an open, honest and respectful communicator. That you enjoy asking questions, identifying areas of improvement, and proposing solutions, no matter your job title or whether you have been with us for a day, a month, or years! That you are comfortable taking initiative and operating independently. That you thrive in a fast-paced environment, where change is constant. That you find it exciting to work with various clients, from different industries, each with a different problem for you and your team to solve. Intentionally sharing tech and industry trends that excite you with your peers. Seeking continuous feedback and actively taking steps to continuously grow personally and professionally.