Premium Support Engineer

Premium Support Engineer

SUSE, the world's largest independent open source company, helps customers, partners and communities be the difference in their spheres of influence. Through open collaboration and agile, enterprise-grade open source solutions, customers, partners and communities are empowered to simplify tasks, modernize environments and accelerate business innovation – ultimately reaping the benefits of measurable value and better futures. Our customer obsessed operating model means exceptional service, value, flexibility and customer choice, with no enforced lock in.

SUSE's open, open source approach helps our customers and partners move their businesses forward, transforming IT, delivering increased agility and faster innovation.

The role of the Premium Support Engineer is to provide post-implementation product support to our enterprise customers. The objective of the role is to identify and resolve any technical issues related to SUSE products. The Premium Support Engineer should develop business relationships with assigned accounts' technical and management staff, support them by gaining first-hand knowledge of their deployments, as well as their business needs. With this close relationship and familiarity with customers' environments, the Premium Support Engineer shall provide fast response time and ensure proposed solutions are tailored with customer's expectation.

The Premium Support Engineer's goals are to provide proactive assistance and maintain the deployment in an optimal and efficient manner:

• Be available to respond in a defined time scope
• Understand customer's needs for further opportunity discovery
• Possess the ability to work well with a structured and dynamic environment
• Handle the pressure in highly charged situations

Technical skills and competencies need to be balanced with strong communication skills – to build close and trust relationships with customers. This is an individual contributor role – reporting to the Service Delivery Manager. Travel to customer's different working sites will be a requirement.

Responsibilities include:

• Articulate key values of SUSE's offerings: products/solutions/strategies
• Troubleshoot and provide resolution or workaround to customer's technical issues in a timely fashion
• Serve as customer's advocate within the group by facilitating escalation of issues through appropriate internal organizations
• Pro-actively identify issues by becoming familiar with the customer's technical and business environment
• Form strong business relationships with customers at various levels of the organization
• Share knowledge by writing technical documents and pro-actively sending helpful technical information to customers (e.g., upcoming patches, technical news, etc.)
• Communicate work performed in provided systems and documents as requested
• Assist in implementation of Solutions according to SUSE's Best Practice
• Interact with the SUSE Customer Support team as required to meet customer's needs
• Evaluate unique and complex deployments, and make recommendations for optimization
• Develop partnership with and assist the Sales team
• Ability to work in a customer's environment and may at times be required to work outside of standard business hours

Education and experience required:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• 5 years' experience in relevant technologies and customer environments
• Extensive experience in a high-tech or software company
• Relevant industry qualification where applicable

Knowledge and skills:

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English for customer communication and creating and maintaining technical documentation
• Strong practical experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, such as Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE in either Linux or Windows environment
• Hands-on troubleshooting experience as a Support Engineer or equivalent position
• Technical Proficiency on SUSE Security aka NeuVector
• Working knowledge of Git
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to handle tense/stressful situations regarding service outages and issue resolution
• Familiarity with either Rancher, OpenShift, Tanzu, Docker
• Possessing relevant certifications such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator/Developer etc. will be highly advantageous

Personal attributes:

• The ideal candidate will embrace the transformative nature of this role - as we continue our evolution, we require you to build capability and institutionalize best practices within the Container platform
• Questioning and challenging assumptions will be necessary
• Your relationship building skills both with direct peers but also across the wider business will be critical
• Dealing with ambiguity and being both resourceful and enterprising should be second nature to you

SUSE values:

• We are passionate about customers
• We are respectful and inclusive
• We are empowered and accountable
• We are trustworthy and act with integrity
• We are collaborative
• We are SUSE!

This position is subject to a background check(s), including criminal, credit, and/or employment references. The candidate is required to complete the background check(s) once an offer has been accepted. This will be conducted by SUSE's external provider, where legally permitted.