Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard is a trusted source for open source software, helping organizations build faster and stay compliant. The company is seeking a Customer Support Manager to manage the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, ensuring quality and reliability in the escalation process from customer issues to engineering resolution.
Responsibilities
- Own the L2/L3 escalation boundary: define routing criteria, review escalation quality, and drive down unnecessary L3 load without increasing customer time-to-resolution
- Maintain and improve escalation intake workflows including triage standards, ticket hygiene, and handoff artifacts for engineering partners
- Track escalation health metrics and report on trends to engineering leadership; identify capacity risks in eng teams before they become bottlenecks
- Run escalation retrospectives to close the loop on resolution patterns and feed signal back into product and documentation
- Manage, coach, support and develop the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, with direct attention to technical depth and debugging rigor
- Operate career leveling frameworks for IC growth (L1 through L6); hold bar on promotions and ensure growth plans are actionable
- Coordinate AMER handoffs with APAC and EMEA peer managers to maintain follow-the-sun coverage quality: clear ownership at every handoff, with uninterrupted SLA performance
- Identify and close skill gaps proactively, particularly in Linux fundamentals, container security, and Kubernetes ecosystems
- Own the support tooling stack including ticketing systems, AI-assisted triage, and deflection tooling
- Partner 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; know where automation adds leverage and where it introduces risk
- Use support data to surface product quality signals and operational trends to engineering and product leadership
- Serve as the primary interface between Technical Support Engineering and product engineering teams for escalated issues
- Maintain a functional relationship with Customer Success and GTM without allowing those teams to define support quality standards or escalation criteria
- Contribute to product feedback loops through reproducible, well-scoped bug reports and actionable pattern analysis
Skills
- 4+ years managing technical support engineers or software engineers in a production-facing environment
- Demonstrated ability to design and operate an escalation process: not just follow one
- Technical credibility in the Linux ecosystem; comfortable reading logs, understanding container runtimes, and engaging with engineering teams as an active peer
- Strong written communication; capable of writing clear escalation summaries, retrospective reports, and leadership-facing metrics briefs
- Track record of developing engineers through real feedback, structured growth plans, and calibrated performance conversations
- Comfort operating in a globally distributed support org with peer managers in other regions; strong handoff discipline
- Experience with container security, DevSecOps tooling, Kubernetes, or open source software ecosystems
- Familiarity with Zendesk or similar ticketing platforms at an operational level (workflows, configuration, reporting)
- Exposure to AI-assisted support tooling, LLM-based triage, or knowledge retrieval systems
Benefits
- Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
- We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
- ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
- 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
Company Overview
Chainguard is a cloud-native development platform that provides low-to-zero CVE container images for building and running applications. It was founded in 2021, and is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is https://www.chainguard.dev.