Senior Customer Support Engineer, CIQ
+ Employee stock options
Enterprise-grade open source software infrastructure
Open for applications
Enterprise-grade open source software infrastructure
101-200 employees
Open for applications
+ Employee stock options
101-200 employees
Company mission
To simplify and unify software infrastructure, enabling customers to craft ground breaking technologies for generations to come.
Role
Who you are
- Deep Linux internals expertise spanning kernel and user space, systemd, filesystems and storage, and networking, with the ability to read a stack trace, a core dump, or a performance profile and form a defensible hypothesis from it
- The instinct to reproduce before concluding. You separate what you observed from what you inferred, and you say plainly which is which
- Fluency with the tools of the job: crash and kdump, gdb, strace and ltrace, perf, eBPF and bpftrace, SystemTap, and the RPM build and packaging chain
- Experience with containers and orchestration such as Apptainer, Podman, and Kubernetes, and with virtualization on KVM, QEMU, and libvirt
- Comfort operating across bare metal, on-premises HPC clusters, and the major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Automation as a reflex: Bash and Python at a minimum, plus Ansible or an equivalent configuration management tool, and CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI
- Excellent written communication. A large share of this role is explaining a difficult technical finding, in writing, to a customer who is under pressure, without overstating what is actually known
- Sound judgment about escalation: knowing when an issue is genuinely critical, and knowing when declaring it critical would cost the team more than it saves
- A willingness to use AI tooling as a force multiplier while owning every word that reaches a customer
- Experience mentoring engineers and improving how a team works, not only what it ships
- A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving to be better attitude
- Proven work experience as a senior support engineer, systems engineer, or DevOps engineer supporting enterprise, government, or research customers in production
- Seven or more years in Linux systems engineering, support engineering, or a comparable production environment, including five or more years of hands-on linux expertise
- Demonstrated ownership of critical escalations for large enterprise, government, or research accounts, including direct communication with those customers under pressure
- Experience packaging sources, building RPMs, and delivering through package managers, repositories, and ISO distributions
- Experience in HPC, AI and ML infrastructure, defense, or another regulated or performance-intensive domain is a plus
- Familiarity with security and compliance workflows such as CVE applicability analysis, DISA STIG, SCAP, and FIPS-validated configurations
- Demonstrable involvement in the open source community is required
- CKA preferred or required to achieve within the first 6 months
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Senior Customer Support Engineer to own the hardest technical problems our enterprise customers bring us. CIQ's customers run Rocky Linux and the RLC Pro family in production at national laboratories, hyperscalers, global manufacturers, and government agencies
- When something breaks in one of those environments, this is the person who resolves it. This is a senior individual contributor role: you will carry the deepest escalations, set the technical standard for how support is delivered, and raise the capability of the engineers around you
- This role sits in Customer Engineering, a team that runs on a Human First, AI-Enabled principle. Your domain expertise and your relationships with customers are the differentiator. AI removes the overhead around that work, the research, the triage, and the drafting, and it never stands between a customer and a person. You will help set that standard, not simply work inside it. Additional responsibilities include but are not limited to:
- Owning the most complex technical escalations across CIQ's enterprise customer base, from first report through verified root cause to confirmed resolution, including issues that require kernel-level debugging
- Serving as the senior technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and building an understanding of each customer's architecture, workloads, and constraints deep enough to advise them rather than react to them
- Debugging Linux at depth across kernel, user space, systemd, storage, networking, and performance, on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, and cloud infrastructure
- Setting the technical standard for the support organization: reproduction discipline, root-cause rigor, and a clean separation between an observed symptom and an inferred cause in every customer communication
- Mentoring support engineers and reviewing their technical work, so the team's capability grows instead of the hardest tickets permanently routing to one person
- Driving customer-facing defects into Engineering with a reproduction, a diagnosis, and enough context that the fix is unambiguous, then tracking each one through to release
- Contributing automated test coverage that encodes real customer configurations and failure modes, so defects our customers would have hit are caught before a release ships rather than after
- Converting resolved escalations into durable knowledge through knowledge base articles, documentation corrections, and training content, so the next customer with the same question can answer it without opening a ticket
- Using AI-assisted tooling to compress the research, triage, and drafting around support work, while personally reviewing every customer-facing output. The judgment and the published answer remain yours
- Participating in the on-call rotation for critical customer issues and in release readiness reviews for the products you support
- Engaging directly with the Rocky Linux and broader open source communities, upstream and in public forums
Our take
Development of the Community Enterprise Linux Operating System (CentOS) was dropped by IBM’s RedHat in just 2020, leaving a gaping hole in the market. When CIQ’s founders swept in to offer a replacement, Rocky Linux, and a complementary support and servicing company CIQ, the demand reportedly skyrocketed - and, according to CIQ, it hasn’t subsided since.
That’s because the old CentOS was one of the principal OSs used by enterprise, cloud, VMs, and containers - Google, for example, was among one of its many enterprise users. Now Google has picked up Rocky Linux, and CIQ has consequently scooped up that major partnership too - and some healthy funding. It’s a fitting reward for a highly savvy play from the CIQ founders, picking up a tried-and-tested product that’s already achieved strong market penetration.
Besides Rocky Linux, CIQ has also developed cluster provisioning solution Warewulf, high performance computing (HPC) app containers tool Apptainer, and hybrid performance computing platform-as-a-Service Fuzzball. So it’s safe to say that CIQ has managed to skilfully manoeuvre its way into a pivotal position in the development of cutting edge high performance computing architecture. Now it will need to ensure it can capitalize on its lead.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
56% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2022
$26m
SERIES A
Jan 2021
$4m
SERIES A
Total funding: $30m
Company HQ
North Valleys, Reno, NV
Leadership
Gregory Kurtzer
(Co-Founder & CEO)Spent over 16 years as a System Architect, Technical Lead, and Scientific Advisor at Berkeley Lab, before moving into a Corporate Advisor role at RStor. Alongside this, also founded and served as CEO at Sylabs.
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