Staff Support Engineer

Staff Support Engineer

About the Team

CircleCI's Customer Engineering organization exists at the intersection of technical depth and customer impact. We comprise Technical Success Managers and Support Engineering — working together to ensure every customer experience moves their business forward. Support Engineering isn't a traditional support function: we surface escalation patterns, drive platform improvements, protect revenue, and operate with engineering rigor. We're a team where technical ambition and customer obsession are equally valued, and where the work you do shapes the product as much as it shapes the customer experience.

About the Role

The Staff Support Engineer is the technical authority and strategic backbone of Support Engineering. This role operates at organizational scope — well beyond individual tickets — owning the escalation model, shaping cross-functional engineering relationships, and driving platform-level improvements that reduce future support burden. You are the technical voice in cross-functional forums, a trusted advisor to leadership, and the connective tissue between Enterprise customers and Product/Engineering. Success here means the team is sharper, the product is more supportable, and recurring escalation patterns stop recurring.

What You'll Do:

• Own Support Engineering's escalation management: coordinate research and reproductions with Product Engineering, identify recurring patterns, and drive structural corrections that prevent repeat incidents.
• Serve as the senior cross-functional liaison between Support Engineering and Product, Engineering, Security, and Revenue — attending scoping sessions, architectural discussions, and GTM forums to ensure supportability is a design requirement, not an afterthought.
• Lead AI-assisted tool development and set team standards for code quality, review practices, and responsible adoption of emerging capabilities across the engineering interface.
• Identify and lead team initiatives, owning delivery and ensuring AI adoption objectives are reflected in team priorities and cross-team roadmap discussions.
• Mentor Support Engineers at all levels; develop the next generation of cross-functional technical leads and assist managers where coaching opportunities arise.
• Define and continuously evolve Support Engineering's operational practices — escalation workflows, sandbox standards, and AI-integrated processes — at organizational scope.

What You'll Bring:

• 7+ years of technical product support or engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to operate autonomously across multiple teams and influence without direct authority
• Proven track record leading complex, cross-functional escalations and driving root cause elimination — not just resolution
• Strong programming proficiency in one or more languages; ability to build tools, conduct peer code review, and contribute to Engineering R&D with a supportability lens
• High understanding of distributed service architecture across product specialty areas, including AI-powered component integration and failure modes
• Demonstrated business acumen: ability to align decisions to company OKRs, quantify the impact of operational patterns, and contribute economic perspective to tooling and process decisions
• Experience mentoring engineers and building team capability; track record of reducing siloed knowledge and creating organizational redundancy

Bonus Skills (Nice to Have)

• Experience with build, test, and deployment automation (CI/CD) in a technical leadership or customer-facing capacity
• Familiarity with AI/ML technologies and LLM-based code diagnostics
• Advanced knowledge of Docker, Linux containers, and Kubernetes for container orchestration
• Expertise automating major IaaS platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) with a DevOps focus
• Experience debugging distributed systems and microservices architectures
• Knowledge of iOS application testing, code signing, and deployment processes