Support Engineer

At Fly.io, we have a small support team on the front lines helping customers get, and keep, their apps running happily. We’re looking for a Support Engineer (or two) to join us.

The principal channels for support at Fly.io are our public forum at community.fly.io, and email. The forum hosts an active, helpful community, and the Fly.io team (including, but not limited to, support engineers) is always around for backup (and sometimes head-on) assistance. We expect the number of customers actively using email support to increase soon.

A lot of this job is triage and helping customers learn how to get help for themselves. But this isn’t a “follow-the-script” role. Our support engineers are writing the script, and even triage can require creative problem solving and technical chops.

You’ll need to get familiar with many aspects of how the Fly.io platform works, and develop a good sense of which issues can be solved at the user end, and which you’ll need to recruit the help of platform engineers to solve.

This also involves negotiating our team dynamics, knowing when to ask for help and how to get help fast when it’s really needed.

About Us & About the Job

• We’re a small team, almost entirely technical.
• Support engineers are experts in getting apps deployed on Fly, and they help customers figure out how to get past tricky spots when things don’t go as expected.
• Product engineering also often directly supports customers; part of support’s role is to triage issues and collect enough detail to help other teams dig deeper into an extra thorny problem.
• We are active in developer communities, including our own at community.fly.io. The support engineer plays a big role in this community by adding meaningful troubleshooting and diagnosis information in most posts.
• Virtually all customer communication is in writing. We are a global company, but most of our communication is in English. Clear writing in English is essential.
• We are remote, with team members in Colorado, Quebec, Chicago, London, Spain, Virginia, Brazil, Utah, and more! Most internal communication is also written, and often asynchronous. You’ll want to be comfortable with not getting an immediate response for everything, but also know when you need to get an immediate response for something.
• We are an unusually public team; you’d want to be comfortable working in open channels rather than secretively over in a dark corner.
• We’re a real company – hopefully that goes without saying – and this is a real, according-to-Hoyle full-time job with health care for US employees, flexible vacation time, hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff. The compensation for this role is $120k-$165k USD plus equity.

What You’ll Do

• Keep an eye on all the places that customers might ask for support - email, Slack, Community, etc. - and figure out the best way to respond. The response might change depending on the issue, and that’s ok!
• Answer a pretty broad range of questions — sometimes the question is about deploying an app, sometimes a problem is because of a networking issue, and sometimes it requires some digging into log files to figure out where to start looking. You won’t be responsible for answering every problem! But it will help if you can quickly triage them, and can start people on the right path for getting a problem solved.
• Triage issues, get help from other teams if needed, and provide useful information in most responses. Status updates help customers feel heard — this is good! Clear, actionable troubleshooting steps along with the updates are even better.
• Monitor active support issues to make sure things are moving toward some kind of resolution.
• Create and update documentation for questions that are answered more than a few times. Since we want to help customers be self-sufficient whenever we can, the most useful docs will not just include answers, but also troubleshooting steps and key data customers can collect to help them diagnose problems.

You’ll Be Good at This Job if You

• Know your way around software development. Our customers are developers, so it is helpful if you have some experience building apps (even a simple one!), and bonus points if you are familiar with how it runs on Fly.io.
• Are comfortable digging through code when the occasion calls for it. If you’ve built some apps of your own AND you love helping customers, this could be a fun role.
• Have good instincts for balancing customer demands with healthy boundaries. Your favorite interactions are the ones where you taught a customer how to solve their own problem.
• Have fun getting absorbed in a tricky new problem, but also know when to cut bait.
• Like some structure, but are comfortable with not having a standard playbook for most problems. You also like putting some structure in place where there isn’t any, and are open to trying new things if something isn’t working.

You’ll Know You’re Succeeding in This Job If

• Customers know what to expect when you respond to their support questions. They know what they should tell you about their problem, and they have a realistic idea of what to expect back from us.
• You can triage whether an issue is one the customer can resolve on their own, or if the problem is on the Fly infrastructure.
• When you need help from others on the team on a support issue, you’ve included enough information to get the problem closer to diagnosis or resolution.
• You are helping to turn most support questions turn into support documentation.

How We Hire People

Our hiring process may be a little different from what you’re used to. We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent. So instead of resumes and interviews, we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it; “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet. (We’re happy to talk, though!)

For this role, we’re going to ask you to deploy an app on Fly and then write about some issues that customers might run into. We’ll also ask you to identify some possible topics for support documentation.

If you’re interested, mail jobs+supportengineer@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please also include 1. your GitHub username (so we can create a private work sample repo for you) 2. your location (so we know what timezone you’re in for scheduling) and 3. a sentence about your favorite food (so we know you’re not a bot.)