Future Openings - SRE Support Engineer - Observability

SRE Support Engineer - Observability

While this position is not currently open, we are interviewing strong candidates for upcoming opportunities on this team.

Location: Remote | Time Zone: (US, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico) (8AM–5PM Pacific)

Freedom to grow. Power to deliver.

Virtasant is a global technology services company delivering large-scale cloud, data, and engineering solutions across 130+ countries. We partner with some of the world’s largest organizations to help them build, operate, and scale internal platforms used by tens of thousands of engineers.

For this role, you will be supporting one of the most advanced internal developer platforms in the world, powering products used by hundreds of millions of people. The problems you will solve are deep, complex, and essential to keeping a global-scale organization moving.

Role Overview

The Observability & Tools Support Engineer provides high-impact technical support for customers of a large technology company’s internal IaaS platform, with a focus on monitoring, alerting, telemetry, and operational tooling.

This role spans a wide range of support—from white-glove onboarding and end-to-end customer enablement, to deep technical troubleshooting across Linux, networking, and observability systems (especially Prometheus and AlertManager). You will also contribute to improving the support function itself: strengthening tooling, documentation, workflows, and feedback loops so the service scales.

Success depends on excellent troubleshooting, strong written communication, comfort working with highly technical customers, and the maturity to identify patterns and drive operational improvements beyond individual ticket resolution.

Business Outcome

Become a trusted frontline expert for the customer’s observability ecosystem and operational tooling - delivering fast, accurate support across Slack and tickets, improving monitoring reliability, and reducing incident impact through better triage, troubleshooting, onboarding, and knowledge capture.

Success Measures

Healthy volume of threads and tickets handled with high-quality outcomes

Consistent achievement of time-based SLAs

High customer satisfaction through surveys

Accurate classification of issue type, severity, and recurring patterns

Reduced repeat issues through better docs, tooling, and scalable onboarding

What Will Be True When You Succeed

Customers can onboard smoothly to monitoring/alerting with minimal friction

Monitoring and alerting issues are resolved quickly, with fewer escalations

Linux and networking-related incidents reach resolution faster due to strong troubleshooting and clean handoffs

Engineering and SRE teams receive clear, actionable feedback based on real customer trends

Knowledge base content prevents tickets and accelerates self-service

Core Work Units

1) Frontline Support for Observability & Tooling

Manage Slack threads and tickets (roughly 50/50)

Handle a broad range of customer support: simple issue resolution through end-to-end onboarding

Provide clear, structured guidance to highly technical customers

Maintain strong attention to detail while managing multiple interactions in parallel

2) Deep-Dive Troubleshooting & Incident Support

Troubleshoot, isolate, and resolve monitoring and alerting issues (especially Prometheus + AlertManager)

Troubleshoot complex Linux and networking issues (TCP/IP fundamentals required)

Support OpenTelemetry, tracing, and telemetry pipelines, including investigation of gaps in signals and instrumentation

Drive incidents to resolution in partnership with Engineering/SRE teams

3) Documentation & Knowledge Development

Build and maintain customer-facing and internal knowledge base articles

Create informational posts for the community support platform

Turn repeated issues into reusable guides, checklists, and onboarding playbooks

4) Trend Analysis & Feedback to Engineering

Analyze and categorize customer interaction trends

Provide accurate, meaningful feedback to Engineering and SRE orgs to improve product/tooling

Identify “top offenders” and propose practical fixes (tooling, docs, process, product)

5) Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

Participate in post-mortem reviews and drive follow-through on improvements

Contribute meaningfully to team objectives and goals (process, tooling, and service scaling)

Bring creativity and discretion to resolve highly complex issues “outside the box”

High-Quality Work - what top performance looks like

Frontline Support

Moves smoothly from triage to deeper analysis without losing the customer

Communicates clearly and confidently with technical users

Maintains clean follow-ups and thread hygiene even with high context switching

Troubleshooting

Rapidly isolates issues across monitoring/alerting configs, Linux runtime behavior, and network connectivity

Uses structured approaches to incident handling: hypothesis → test → evidence → resolution

Produces high-signal writeups that accelerate downstream resolution

Documentation & Enablement

Documentation is clear enough that customers avoid opening tickets

Onboarding flows reduce time-to-value and prevent common misconfigurations

Captures “tribal knowledge” quickly and makes it reusable

Operational Excellence

Obsessing over details: correct severity, accurate tagging, clean timelines, strong handoffs

Spots patterns early and proactively proposes improvements that scale support

Typical Day / Work Patterns

~50% Slack support, ~50% ticket handling

Deep-dive investigations during lower ticket volume periods

Documentation writing and lightweight tooling/process improvements when patterns emerge

Weekly team review of escalations, themes, and operational improvements

High rate of context switching and parallel issue management

Required Skills & Experience (Non-Negotiable)

Several years supporting highly scalable applications and web services

Hands-on experience with open-source observability and cloud-native tooling, including:

Kubernetes (and container fundamentals)

Prometheus and AlertManager troubleshooting

OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing concepts

Strong understanding of the Linux operating system (command line, process/network debugging, logs)

Good understanding of infrastructure observability principles (signals, alerting strategy, SLO thinking, noise reduction)

Good understanding of the TCP/IP suite and practical networking troubleshooting

Strong experience troubleshooting ambiguous, multi-layer issues

Excellent analytical capability and strong attention to detail

Strong written and verbal communication (clear, structured, customer-friendly)

Comfortable working with a very technical customer base

Passion for Technical Support and a service mindset

Nice-to-Haves

Experience improving or supporting internal support tooling or workflows (automation, templates, runbooks)

Experience operating at scale in a services environment (pattern detection, KPI/SLA awareness, operational process maturity)

Familiarity with Grafana, log aggregation, incident tooling, and production support practices

Prior SRE or platform support experience

Minimum Qualifications

3–7+ years in Technical Support Engineering, SRE support, DevOps, Platform Support, or similar

Demonstrated experience supporting distributed systems, IaaS, or cloud platforms

Strong Linux, troubleshooting, and customer-facing communication background

Evidence of documentation, knowledge-base contributions, and process improvement mindset

Disqualifiers: weak Linux fundamentals, inability to troubleshoot systematically, poor written communication, or discomfort supporting highly technical users.

What You’ll Love

Real technical problem solving with tangible customer impact

A role that blends deep troubleshooting with scaling support via docs, tooling, and process

High autonomy in a remote-first environment

What May Be Challenging

High context switching and managing multiple threads in parallel

Repeated patterns that require discipline to convert pain into scalable improvements

Supporting high-visibility systems where speed and accuracy matter

Differentiation

Industry: Remote-first, trust-based culture; global team; autonomy; modern systems; meaningful technical challenges

Internal: High-impact, customer-facing observability support; direct influence on tooling and process maturity; opportunity to shape scalable support practices