Senior Support Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Support Engineer to lead our support function — owning the team, coordinating customer escalations, and setting the bar for how Clastix runs in production at our customers.

At Clastix, we build technologies used in production by companies like NVIDIA, OVH, Rackspace, and Fastweb to run Kubernetes at scale. Our open-source projects (Kamaji, Project Capsule) and our commercial platform kMetal give Large Enterprises and Managed Service Providers the building blocks to deliver Kubernetes-as-a-Service — and the people running those workloads expect a responsive, competent team when something breaks.

You are the owner of that team. You coordinate the flow of customer tickets and escalations end-to-end: triaging incoming work, deciding what stays in support and what gets escalated to Engineering, leading incident response on the hard cases, and making sure nothing falls between the cracks. You mentor the Support Engineer today, and hire and grow the team as the customer base scales.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a pure management seat — you stay close to the platform, debug the hard tickets yourself, and lead by example. You partner closely with Engineering (where escalations land) and with the Senior DevOps Engineer (where customers come from after onboarding).

Our team is remote-first within Europe, with frequent in-person meetups for team building. Professional fluency in English (written and spoken) is mandatory.

• Lead the Support Engineer day-to-day; coach, review, and grow the team's technical and customer-handling skills

• Hire and onboard additional support engineers as the customer base scales

• Own the full escalation flow — from first customer report through resolution

• Decide what stays in support and what gets escalated to Engineering, owning the handoff with the context Engineering needs to move fast

• Lead production incident response across our open-source projects and kMetal — including out-of-hours escalations when needed

• Track every open escalation across the team and make sure nothing stalls or gets dropped

• Set and own the team's operational practice: ticket workflows, response patterns, on-call rotation, internal SLAs

• Pick up the most complex tickets yourself — debug etcd, CNI, control plane, bare-metal weirdness; reproduce, fix, communicate

• Run blameless post-incident reviews and turn each one into permanent fixes — runbooks, hardening tickets, product changes

• Channel field signal back into Engineering as bug reports, feature requests, and roadmap inputs

• Define and report on support KPIs (MTTR, CSAT, ticket volume, deflection) and use them to drive continuous improvement

• Maintain the runbook and playbook library so the team scales without scaling chaos

• Coordinate with the Senior DevOps Engineer to ensure clean handoffs from onboarding into day-2 operations

• Contribute to our open-source community around Kamaji and Project Capsule by triaging complex user issues

We strongly encourage the team to leverage generative AI tools for productivity. A Claude Pro subscription is provided, and we expect you to use modern AI-assisted workflows for log analysis, documentation drafting, and repetitive investigative tasks.

• 3–5 years in support engineering, site reliability, platform operations, or technical escalations roles

• Track record of leading or coordinating a support team, on-call rotation, or escalation queue — even on a small team

• Deep operational experience with Kubernetes in enterprise or large-scale production environments — beyond greenfield labs

• Hands-on experience with Linux, networking, storage, and container fundamentals — you can debug a broken etcd or a misbehaving CNI yourself, not just route the ticket

• Proven incident command experience: leading production incidents and running blameless post-mortems

• Strong written communication — able to explain technical topics to customers without jargon, and to write up RCAs that are useful to read

• Comfortable owning customer relationships at the technical level (SRE leads, Heads of Platform)

• Fluent in English (written and spoken)

• Prior experience setting up a support function or on-call rotation in a small or early-stage company

• Familiarity with hosted control plane patterns (Cluster API, Kamaji, vCluster) and bare metal Kubernetes

• Exposure to observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki) and incident management platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie)

• Scripting ability in Bash, Python, or Go for ad-hoc automation and diagnostics

• Experience contributing to open-source projects, forums, or technical communities

• Remote Work: flexible remote or hybrid work options across Europe.

• Performance-Based: focus on results and outcomes, not set working hours; high autonomy and ownership expected.

• International Environment: enterprise customers and distributed team across Europe, US, and beyond.

• Team leadership: own and grow the support practice — with a clear path to Head of Operations as the team scales.

• Engineering-first culture: strong focus on understanding the platform, not just triaging tickets — your feedback shapes how we work and what we build.

• Small senior team: direct impact on product, customers, and company direction.

Depending on experience, our gross salary range is between 45.000 and 60.000 EUR. Candidates entitled to a valid work permit for Italy will be employed under a permanent contract regulated by Italian laws.

EU citizens, as well as individuals with a valid EU work permit, may engage under a B2B independent contractor agreement.

Send your CV and a brief introduction to jobs@clastix.io with the subject line "Senior Support Engineer Application".