Support Readiness Specialist
Support Readiness Specialist
As a Support Readiness Specialist, you will be responsible for ensuring the Support Engineers and Support Managers are able to deliver consistently high quality support.
Depending on your specialization, you will be contributing towards a variety of tasks towards that end.
Job Grade
The Support Readiness Specialist is a grade 6.
What you can expect in a Support Readiness Specialist role at GitLab
As a Support Readiness Specialist you will:
- Develop a flexible process and execution strategy to support the growth and scalability objectives of GitLab Support and company wide initiatives.
- Own and drive projects to completion in agreement with relevant stakeholders in a cross-departmental function.
- Manage a fast-paced queue of requests, prioritize requests according to business impact, and drive to appropriate completion dates.
- Understand internal customer’s needs and business context to provide outstanding support and maintain high customer satisfaction.
- Assist with implementation of new systems as needed to support evolving processes and critically evaluate our use of systems with a view to improve global efficiency.
Specializations
Operations
As a Support Readiness Specialist - Operations, you will be responsible for supporting the day-to-day operations and software systems used by GitLab’s global Technical Support team (including, but not limited to: our Zendesk instance(s), GitLab.com projects/integrations, and Calendly setup). You will be able to juggle a diverse workload that includes everything from managing user provisioning, to troubleshooting custom applications in support of a global organization. As we rely on our systems to support and scale the organization, you will be the backbone and the foundation to our success!
- Support and maintain several business critical SaaS systems (such as Zendesk, GitLab.com, Slack, Salesforce, Google groups), including user administration, in accordance with written and audited security controls and configuration changes when needed.
- Develop and maintain system failover processes for customer facing GitLab Support systems.
- Provide support and troubleshooting for our Support systems when necessary.
- Maintain and demonstrate 100% compliance with all written security policies and change management controls, as well as assisting with audits of user access to key systems.
Additional Requirements
- Zendesk Administrator experience (preferred; or the ability to gain Zendesk Administrator Certification within 6 months of start date if required)
- Zendesk enthusiast who thrives on working in a fast-paced and changing environment
- Understanding of business processes and ability to translate business requirements into application functionality
Projects you might work on
When you are not tackling your normal day to day challenges, you’ll have a lot of freedom to work on things that will make your life, and the lives of your coworkers, easier. Current and past Support Readiness Specialists in Operations have:
- Created tooling to generate weekly 1-1 issues for Support Engineers containing metrics, random tickets to review, etc.
- Developed tooling to generate weekly account deletion reports.
- Leaned into dogfooding by having various aspects of Zendesk version controlled via GitLab.com.
- …and even more!
Services Delivery
As a Support Readiness Specialist - Services Delivery, you will be responsible for ensuring that support quality remains high by gathering metrics, identifying trends, working cross-functionally to communicate those trends. To do this you’ll:
- Work with Support Managers and the Director of Support Readiness to identify ticket trends and health by customer and ticket types.
- Proactively engage with customers, their Customer Success Managers and Support Management when ticket trends turn unhealthy to facilitate a return to normal.
- Monitor trending product usage, adoption and satisfaction issues in tickets to provide insights to your counterparts in Support Readiness - Training and keep Support Managers informed about coaching opportunities.
- Regularly review Support Satisfaction (SSAT) scores to provide meaningful insights on trends in feedback.
- Liaise with Product and Engineering based on insights gathered from tickets and SSAT to help inform priorities based on customer impact.
- Build two-way roads between Product and Support by working with the pool of global Support Engineers acting as Support Stable Counterparts
Training
As a Support Readiness Specialist - Training, you will be responsible for creating an environment of continuous improvement that ensures the people who support GitLab every day have relevant expertise to resolve customer issues quickly. To do this you’ll:
- develop relevant and engaging learning content based on expressed and discovered needs.
- work with Support Management to help Support Engineers prioritize progress through training modules or other professional development content.
- improve publicly available and paid learning content by working with our Channel and Learning and Development teams to avoid duplication of effort.
- use your creativity to innovate and discover what can make learning more fun and inclusive: compose songs, write poems, film short-format viral video content - whatever it takes to improve retention and get better customer outcomes.
- work with Support Readiness Specialists in Operations to bring relevant workflow information or documentation closer to customers, Support Engineers and Support Management.
- coordinate with Support Readiness Specialists in Service Delivery on improving ticket quality and customer satisfaction with Support (SSAT).
- facilitate the self-organization and activities of Support Pods
- keep your eye on the horizon for product and offering changes to keep support prepared for the future.
Requirements
Requires Skills/Experience
- 1-3 years experience in SaaS support, with proven ability to support diverse customers needs.
- Demonstrated technical aptitude for, and experience supporting, client-server and/or web-based applications and SaaS/PaaS solutions
- Proven ability to solve practical business problems
- Strong team player with service-oriented attitude and customer focus
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- An eye for detail and out-of-the-box thinking
- You share our values, and work in accordance with those values
- An ability to use GitLab, or a readiness to learn how to fully utilize GitLab
Desired Skills
- Demonstrated understanding of technical software support processes and concepts
- Experience in CRM or a related industry
- Familiarity with change management processes and risk control compliance
- Experience working on the Zendesk platform as a developer
- Experience with enterprise integration tools
- Coding experience with an object oriented language (such as Ruby, Python, etc.)
Senior Support Readiness Specialist
A Senior Support Operations Specialist is a more experienced engineer who continues to contribute as an individual while operating with equal comfort at the level of team enablement. That is, they work at the team level to increase every member’s ability to contribute.
Job Grade
The Senior Support Engineer is a grade 7.
What you can expect in a Senior Support Readiness Specialist role at GitLab
Generally they meet the following criteria. They:
- are involved in mentoring teammates on new technologies, new processes/workflows, and new GitLab features.
- posses expert knowledge of the various odds and ends of being a Support Readiness Specialist.
- submit merge requests to improve on Support Readiness workflows/processes.
- drive system enhancements and fixes based on product expertise and GitLab Support interactions.
- contribute to one or more complementary projects.
A Senior Support Readiness Specialist may be interested in exploring Support Readiness Management as an alternative at this point. See Engineering Career Development for more details.
Career Ladder
For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.
How you’ll be measured
Performance Indicators
Support Operations collaborates with the global Support Engineering team to achieve the following performance indicators, by ensuring we have the most efficient workflows through our applications:
- Providing top tier support to the GitLab Support Engineering team
- Driving the Support Operations mission and vision
- Maintenance of Support Operations documentation
- Adherence and improvement of Support Operations workflows
Hiring Process
Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.
- Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with our Global Recruiters.
- Selected candidates receive a short assessment from our Global Recruiters.
- Candidates will then be invited to schedule a 30 minute technical interview with a Support Readiness Specialist.
- Candidates will then be invited to schedule a 45 minute behavioral interview with a panel consisting of a Support Operations Manager and a Support Engineering Manager.
- Candidates will then be invited to schedule a 45 minute behavioral interview with our Director of Support Readiness.
- Candidates will then undergo reference checks.
- Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email.
Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.
Compensation Calculator
To find out more about the compensation for this role, please apply to a open role on our careers page first. Once you’ve applied and are selected for a screening call, you’ll be able to sign up here to view our compensation calculator. Be sure to use the same email address for both.
About GitLab
GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.
We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.
About GitLab
GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.
We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.
Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:
- Mission: Everyone can contribute
- Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
- Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
- Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
- Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
- Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
- Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
- Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
- Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
- Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices
See our culture page for more!
Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.
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