Senior Customer Support Engineer (Tier 3), Customer Escalations
About The Position
If you're passionate about solving complex technical problems and helping build trust between customers and engineering, this is the role for you. We're seeking a motivated Senior Customer Support Engineer (Tier 3), Customer Escalations to join our Escalation Engineering team. You'll take ownership of our most complex, ambiguous customer escalations, solving issues where the root cause is not always obvious. You will work these issues to resolution or alternatively a fully-documented handoff that engineering can act on without delay. As a Senior Customer Support Engineer (Tier 3), Customer Escalations, you'll partner closely with Support and Product/Engineering to close the gap between "customer has described a problem" and "engineering has what it needs to fix it." This role reports directly to the Customer Escalations Team Lead.
Requirements
- 4+ years in a technical support or escalation role at a SaaS or infrastructure company, with demonstrated ownership of escalated/enterprise-tier accounts.
- A genuine problem-solver who gets energy from untangling hard, ambiguous technical issues
- Comfortable owning a live, high-stakes customer call: staying calm, building trust, and communicating clearly with a frustrated or technical customer under pressure.
- Hands-on networking experience in production or homelab environments: TCP/IP, routing, DNS, firewalls, NAT, VPNs, load balancers.
- Deep familiarity with overlay networking concepts — WireGuard, UDP hole punching, STUN — and comparable VPN/networking products.
- Code-level debugging capability: can read Go source, reason about goroutines/locks/channels, read pprof CPU/heap profiles, and understand network interface semantics.
- Comfortable with infrastructure concepts: cloud IaaS, CI/CD pipelines, containerized applications, and Kubernetes debugging.
- Strong systems administration skills as well as troubleshooting across Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- Track record of independently building reproducible test cases and clear, evidence-backed bug reports engineering can act on directly.
- Strong technical storytelling: able to distill highly technical, ambiguous issues into clear narratives for both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- Investigative mindset; curious to analyze root cause, and evaluate all options to get customers to the best solution
- Proficiency with programming/scripting in Go, Python, JSON
- Experience with packet-level analysis
Responsibilities
- Own high-severity, post-sales technical escalations from intake through resolution or engineering handoff. This includes deep-dive investigations and reproduction of difficult-to-isolate bugs.
- Get on calls with customers, pull logs, and communicate with the customer about leading theories
- Build engineering handoff packages that require minimal follow-up questions: reproducible case, log evidence (timestamps, node IDs), version matrix, impact scope, what's already been ruled out, and a proposed engineering team to own the fix.
- File and track issues for confirmed bugs, keeping the ticket/issue link intact so engineering retains full customer context.
- Monitor for patterns across escalations to catch recurring or systemic issues early; translate what you learn into product improvements, tooling, and runbooks that raise the technical bar for the whole Support org.
- Partner with Support, CSE, and Product/Eng, while staying within this team's scope
Benefits
- Comprehensive group benefits with no waiting period. Take advantage of coverage for health, vision, dental, and more for you and your family!
- Employer-funded retirement contributions. Tailscale will match your retirement contributions dollar-for-dollar, up to a maximum annual employer contribution equal to 0.75% of your eligible compensation.
- Support for your personal and professional development. Grow your career thoughtfully with $1500 USD annually for professional development, or take advantage of mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
- Paid parental leave program. We care about your life outside of work and encourage new parents to take advantage of parental leave top-ups (20 weeks for birthing parents, 16 weeks for non-birthing parents).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
