Principal Support Engineer

Tyk develops an API Management platform. The Principal Support Engineer provides strategic technical leadership for post-sales support, leading escalations and incident resolution, improving support operations, and partnering with Product, Engineering, and customers.

Responsibilities:

• Proactively oversee the Zendesk queue, ensuring SLAs are consistently met, owning tickets across priority levels, and stepping in on critical, high-impact escalations
• Act as a point of escalation for systemic issues, leading incident resolution and partnering with cross-functional teams - escalations would first come to you before going to Product
• Work with Pod Leads to identify and resolve recurring support workflow challenges
• Guide triage practices to ensure fast, accurate issue isolation across the team
• Lead deep technical investigations, including complex debugging and source code analysis
• Identify and implement process improvements, automation, and AI tools to improve operational efficiency and reduce response/resolution time
• Maintain ticket quality across the board, ensuring product teams receive actionable, high-quality submissions
• Contribute bug fixes, tooling, or workarounds to the codebase to unblock customers
• Anticipate platform-wide issues and proactively work to prevent them through architecture awareness and preventive strategies
• Ensure critical knowledge is documented and shared, maintaining a robust Zendesk knowledge base, debugging guides, and external documentation
• Adhere to escalation SLAs and act as a key player in the on-call rotation to maintain 24/7 global support
• Take ownership of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations
• Regularly review team metrics to identify improvement areas and help set team-wide goals and focus areas
• Partner with Product and Engineering to drive product-level changes based on support data and customer impact
• Represent the Customer Success Engineering team in company-wide strategic initiatives, shaping the future of post-sales support
• Support the evolution of internal support policies (e.g., SLAs, escalation procedures, “won’t fix” standards)
• Serve as a trusted, senior post-sales contact for high-value customers, ensuring a seamless and proactive support experience
• Champion initiatives that improve the customer journey, including better routing, issue ownership, and self-service capabilities
• Take an active leadership role, ensuring timely and technically accurate responses
• Advocate for the voice of the customer in internal planning, identifying feature needs or systemic weaknesses from real-world usage
• Join customer onboarding to introduce the support team, understand the customer's goals, and help establish how we'll work together
• Participate in recurring client meetings to discuss tickets, technical challenges, and customer needs, bringing relevant feedback back to the wider team
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortems for major incidents from a customer success position, ensuring long-term resolution and process adaptation
• Drive ticket volume reduction by identifying recurring pain points and proposing durable solutions at a platform or documentation level
• Play a critical role in evolving support strategy to scale as Tyk grows, influencing structure, tooling, and hiring decisions

Requirements:

• Extensive experience in technical support or success engineering roles, with proven leadership in complex escalations and systemic improvements
• Strong background in dealing with large Enterprise customers
• Strong background in an API / APIM driven environment
• Someone who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty in new technologies
• A great senior engineer not only knows the Tyk component/technologies but they often will have to know and set up other technologies that the customer uses, i.e kubernetes, docker, databases, SSO/IDPs etc
• Strong debugging skills—able to read source code and diagnose issues in distributed systems
• Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to lead without authority, influencing product, engineering, and customer success peers
• Passion for operational excellence, automation, and scalable support strategies
• A growth mindset—you lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to continuously improve yourself and those around you