Customer Support Manager

Role Overview

Chainguard is seeking an experienced Technical Support Engineering Manager to lead the AMER Technical Support Engineering team. As part of a global, follow-the-sun support organization within Engineering, your core responsibility will be ensuring the quality and reliability of the escalation path, from initial customer-reported issues to final engineering resolution. This role owns the critical operational layer between L2 and L3 support, focusing on ticket routing, escalation criteria, handoff quality, and engineering capacity as an integrated system.

This is an ideal position for an engineering-minded manager with deep technical expertise and strong customer relationship skills, capable of driving rigorous engineering outcomes while delivering an exceptional customer experience.

What You'll Do

Escalation Operations

• Own the L2/L3 escalation boundary: Define routing criteria, review escalation quality, and minimize unnecessary L3 load without impacting customer resolution times.
• Maintain and enhance escalation intake workflows, including triage standards, ticket hygiene, and handoff artifacts for engineering partners.
• Track escalation health metrics and report trends to engineering leadership, proactively identifying potential capacity risks.
• Conduct escalation retrospectives to analyze resolution patterns and provide feedback to product and documentation teams.

Team Development

• Manage, coach, support, and develop the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, focusing on technical depth and debugging rigor.
• Operate career leveling frameworks for Individual Contributor (IC) growth (L1-L6) and ensure actionable growth plans.
• Coordinate AMER handoffs with APAC and EMEA peer managers to ensure seamless follow-the-sun coverage and uninterrupted SLA performance.
• Proactively identify and close skill gaps, particularly in Linux fundamentals, container security, and Kubernetes.

Tooling and Automation

• Own the support tooling stack, including ticketing systems, AI-assisted triage, and deflection tools.
• Collaborate with engineering to build and maintain LLM-assisted workflows for escalation intake, ticket quality review, and knowledge retrieval.
• Drive adoption of AI tooling across the team, identifying optimal use cases for automation.
• Utilize support data to surface product quality signals and operational trends to engineering and product leadership.

Cross-Functional Execution

• Act as the primary interface between Technical Support Engineering and product engineering teams for escalated issues.
• Maintain functional relationships with Customer Success and Go-to-Market (GTM) teams while upholding support quality standards.
• Contribute to product feedback loops through well-documented bug reports and actionable pattern analysis.

What We Are Looking For

• 4+ years of experience managing technical support engineers or software engineers in a production-facing environment.
• Demonstrated ability to design and operate an escalation process.
• Technical credibility in the Linux ecosystem, with comfort in reading logs, understanding container runtimes, and engaging with engineering teams.
• Strong written communication skills for clear escalation summaries, reports, and metrics briefs.
• Proven track record of developing engineers through feedback, growth plans, and performance conversations.
• Comfort operating within a globally distributed support organization with strong handoff discipline.

Nice to Have

• Experience with container security, DevSecOps tooling, Kubernetes, or open-source software ecosystems.
• Familiarity with Zendesk or similar ticketing platforms (workflows, configuration, reporting).
• Exposure to AI-assisted support tooling, LLM-based triage, or knowledge retrieval systems.

How This Role Is Measured

Success will be evaluated based on outcomes requiring technical judgment and operational discipline, including:

• L3 escalation score (quality and completeness of escalations).
• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for P0 and P1 tickets.
• L2 deflection rate (while accounting for customer time-to-resolution).
• Engineer retention and growth within the team.
• Coverage model reliability (no dropped handoffs or SLA misses due to scheduling gaps).

Compensation

• Base Salary Range: $140,000—$165,000 USD

About Us

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders.

Our company values:

• Customer Obsessed: Focus on delivering solutions that create value and improve customer lives.
• Bias for Intentional Action: Prioritize, plan, experiment, and fail fast.
• Don't Take Ourselves Too Seriously (but we do serious work): Solve important problems with focus, while enjoying the journey.
• Trust Each Other and Assume Good Intentions: Transparent decision-making empowers team members.

Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Remote work with team meetups, bi-annual summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking, phone, and internet.
• Approach to Equity: Stock options upon hire and promotion, with secondary offering participation and 10-year exercise window.
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance premiums covered for employees and dependents.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents, 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

Chainguard is committed to building the best team and values diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. We are an equal opportunity employer.