Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

About This Role

Overview

Hi! I’m Ben, Director of Customer Experience at Aptible. We’re hiring for a Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE) on our team, a role that combines broad skills in cloud platform hosting and software development. We’re proud of the excellent support we provide our customers, and we believe a key part of this is maintaining a team of competent, motivated engineers who can relate to our users, who are often software engineers and contribute code back to the product our customers use to host their most critical workloads.

In a recent survey, our team reported spending approximately 70% of their time in customer support functions and 30% in project work, including software enhancements and maintenance. As we grow our team, we plan to maintain and balance this workload while we keep a fanatical focus on supporting our customers.

This is a challenging and rewarding position. We have continuous opportunities to build meaningful relationships with our customers, and our team is a supportive, tight-knit group that has each others’ backs at all times. Please consider our requirements below, and if you meet the “must-haves” list below, please apply confidently. I look forward to meeting with you.

You Should Apply If (Must-Haves):

• You are excited about mixing up ticket and chat-based support in addition to software development work, informed by customer interactions. Our team is focused on providing best-in-class customer support, so you should be excited about being on the front lines with our customers.

• You can consistently work Pacific Time Zone hours. This position is a remote position that will require working hours in the Pacific Time Zone, 9am-5pm, and occasionally outside these hours (Please see “You Shouldn’t Apply If” for more context.)

• Your written communication is highly effective and is one of your strongest skills. We’ll put this to the test during the interview process, and the ideal candidate will come with confidence that they can shine here.

• You have experience writing software deployed to scaled production systems. We prefer experience with Ruby on Rails and/or React, but candidates with experience in other stacks are encouraged. While we have flexibility on the depth of experience here, preference will be given to candidates who can bring the most relevant experience to bear.

You Shouldn't Apply If:

• Customer-facing, interrupt-driven workloads are not sustainable for you. While we do take thoughtful approaches to give dedicated space to our team members working on project work, there are times when customer demand and/or team availability require regular interruptions to your planned day.

• Periodically working outside of a 9-5 schedule is not doable for you. While we certainly do whatever is reasonable to keep work-life balance sustainable for our entire team, there are times when the CRE Team, as a whole or individually, will work outside of their regular hours. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Upstream incidents that require “all hands on deck” attention to support our customers. These are quite rare, but when they occur, we come together to do what the day requires.

  • Off-hours customer maintenance: Occasionally, customers may need one of our team members to perform after-hours maintenance, such as in-place database upgrades or environment migrations. We take turns doing these tasks and offer comp time to help ease this periodic burden.

Outcomes

First 3 Months

• Begin working side-by-side with our supportive team of CREs, who will help you hit the ground running. You’ll start with pairing sessions balanced with self-directed training to ensure you have the right balance of learning that matches your preferences and needs.

• Depending on your skill set, we’ll point you toward enhancements and bug fixes for relevant components of our platform. We’ll provide learning support from within our team or our product engineering team, depending on the needs of each project.

First 6 Months

• You’ll own a day per week where you’re triaging our support queue, assigning out tickets to the rest of the team, and triaging chat-based support.

• You’ll frequently contribute to one or more of our platform codebases.

• You’ll be actively contributing to and improving our customer-facing and internal documentation.

• You will have taken advantage of our generous PTO and disconnected and recharged.

First 12-18 Months

• You’ll be an expert on our platform, will be contributing regularly to our platform’s code, and will have taken part in training another new team member.

Compensation at Aptible

The projected salary range for this position is $144,050 - $194,588. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all U.S. locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by a range of factors, including but not limited to job-related competencies, experience, and knowledge. The projected salary range is just one component of Aptible’s total compensation package for employees.