Customer Support Manager

Customer Support Manager Role at Chainguard (USA)

Chainguard, a company focused on providing hardened and secure builds of open source software for global enterprises, is seeking a Customer Support Manager to join our Engineering organization. This is a senior-level position based in the USA, offering a salary of $140,000. You will manage our AMER Technical Support Engineering team as part of a global, follow-the-sun support structure.

In this role, your primary responsibility is to oversee the quality and reliability of the escalation path from initial customer-reported issues through to engineering resolution. We are looking for an engineering-minded manager who views ticket routing, escalation criteria, and engineering capacity as a singular, interconnected system. You will be expected to bridge the operational layer between L2 and L3 support, ensuring rigorous engineering outcomes while maintaining an exceptional customer experience.

Key Responsibilities and Operational Focus

• Escalation Operations: Define and own the L2/L3 escalation boundary. You will maintain triage standards, track escalation health metrics, identify capacity risks, and run retrospectives to feed resolution patterns back into product and documentation.
• Team Development: Coach and develop the AMER Technical Support Engineering team, focusing on technical depth and debugging rigor. You will manage career leveling frameworks, oversee promotions, and coordinate handoffs with APAC and EMEA managers to ensure uninterrupted SLA performance.
• Tooling and Automation: Own the support tooling stack, including ticketing systems and AI-assisted triage. You will partner with engineering to implement LLM-assisted workflows for knowledge retrieval and ticket quality review.
• Cross-Functional Execution: Act as the primary interface between Technical Support Engineering and product engineering teams, ensuring that bug reports are reproducible and actionable.

Requirements

Candidates must have at least 4 years of experience managing technical support engineers or software engineers in a production-facing environment. You must demonstrate a clear ability to design and operate an escalation process. We require strong technical credibility within the Linux ecosystem, including comfort reading logs and understanding container runtimes. Excellent written communication skills are essential for producing escalation summaries, retrospectives, and leadership-facing metrics briefs.