Open role · applications close 4 May 2027

Senior Support Engineer

You will be the third engineer on a support team that owns its own fixes rather than passing tickets to product. Roughly half the week is customer work and half is shipping the changes that stop the same ticket arriving again.

Salary$68k – $84k
LocationRemote, UTC−1 to UTC+3
ContractPermanent, full time
Decision by15 working days
Apply for this role Read the full role first

Every applicant gets an answer, including a "no", and nobody waits more than fifteen working days from applying to knowing. That is the one promise we would ask you to hold us to.

The number, first

$68,000 to $84,000, and here is how the range works

The band is real: people are hired into all of it, and where you land is decided before the final conversation rather than by how hard you negotiate. We do not ask what you earn now, and an offer is never improved by a counter-offer — that mechanism only rewards the people most comfortable pushing.

$68,000 – $84,000

Gross annual, paid monthly, reviewed every February

Entry to the band$68,000
Median of the current team$74,500
Top of the band$84,000
Equipment budget, yours to spec$2,200
Learning budget a year, no approval needed$1,500
The work

What the job actually is

Written from the last three months of the team's work rather than from a template. If a week here looks unappealing, that is useful information for both of us.

What you will do

  • Answer hard tickets — the ones that reach the third line, usually about data imports, timeouts and permissions.
  • Ship the fix yourself in our codebase where it is small, or write the ticket that gets it done properly where it is not.
  • Own the on-call rotation one week in four, with the previous week's incidents reviewed on Monday.
  • Write the documentation that removes the ticket entirely, and get time in the week to do it.
  • Sit in on two customer calls a month, because reading tickets is not the same as hearing the frustration.

What we need from you

  • Three years or so in technical support — the number matters less than having lived through a bad incident.
  • SQL you can write unaided and enough of any backend language to read a stack trace and change a line.
  • Writing that a stranger can follow — most of this job is written, and half of it is read by customers.
  • The instinct to ask "why did this happen" after the customer is unblocked, not instead of unblocking them.
  • No degree requirement. Two of the four people on this team came through support from a non-technical job.
Four steps, fifteen days

How we hire, including the parts people dislike

No take-home task longer than two hours, and it is paid. No panel of six. No "culture fit" round with a job title nobody can explain.

Step 1

Application

The form below. A CV is optional; the three short answers matter more, and they are read by the person you would work for rather than filtered by software.

Reply within 3 days
Step 2

A 40-minute call

With the support lead. Half is us answering your questions, and we send the four things we will ask about beforehand so nobody performs under surprise.

Day 4–7
Step 3

A paid work sample

Two hours on a real anonymised ticket, at a time you choose, paid at $120 whatever the outcome. You keep what you write; we do not ship it.

Day 8–11
Step 4

Team conversation and decision

Ninety minutes with two engineers, then a written decision with the reasoning — including if it is a no, and including which part of the band an offer sits in and why.

By day 15
Who you would work with

Four people, one on-call rotation

Everyone on this team writes, everyone takes tickets, and everyone is on call one week in four including the lead.

Portrait of support lead Ines Duarte
Ines DuarteSupport lead · 4 years here
Portrait of engineer Kwabena Asare
Kwabena AsareSupport engineer · 2 years
Portrait of engineer Marta Sobek
Marta SobekSupport engineer · 1 year
Portrait of engineering manager Yusuf Karim
Yusuf KarimEngineering manager
Terms

Six things that are actually written into the contract

Not "unlimited holiday" or a table-tennis table. These are the ones people ask about in the second interview.

28 days plus public holidays

And a minimum: you are asked to take at least twenty. The lead's calendar shows their own holiday first, which is the only version of this policy that works.

On call one week in four

Paid at $340 a week whether or not you are paged, plus time back in lieu for any night call. Two people are always on the rota, never one.

Remote, within three time zones

UTC−1 to UTC+3, because the rotation needs overlap. Two company weeks a year in person, travel and accommodation paid, and nobody is asked to relocate.

Documentation time in the week

Friday afternoons are blocked for writing, for everyone. It is in the calendar and it is defended, because the alternative is documentation that never gets written.

Salary reviewed every February

For everyone at once, against the published band, without anyone having to ask. Bands are re-benchmarked annually and the new numbers go on this page.

Parental leave, equal

Sixteen weeks fully paid for any parent, regardless of who gave birth, from day one of employment rather than after a qualifying year.

Before you apply

The parts of this job people leave over

Two lists. The right-hand one has cost us candidates, and it has also saved three people from resigning in month four.

You will probably like it if

  • You would rather fix the cause than close the ticket faster.
  • You like writing, and you have opinions about error messages.
  • You want access to the codebase, not a queue and a script.
  • A small team where your name is on things appeals to you.

You will probably not if

  • On-call is a dealbreaker. It is one week in four and it does wake you occasionally.
  • You want to move into product engineering quickly. Two people have; it took both of them over two years.
  • You need a large team around you. There are four of us and you will often be the only one awake.
  • Customer contact drains you. Two calls a month is the minimum, not the maximum.
Questions

Six things applicants ask

No. A link to anything you have written or built is more useful, and the three short answers in the form carry most of the weight. If you attach a CV it is read after those answers, not before — and no software filters it on keywords.

Yes, in writing, in a paragraph specific to you, from the person who made the decision. It is the least we can do in exchange for the hours you spend, and it is also how we find the mistakes in our own process.

$120, paid within a week, whatever the outcome and whether or not you finish it. Two hours is the cap and we mean it — if you spend four we will not read the extra two, because a process that rewards free labour selects for people who can afford to give it away.

Not for this role, and we would rather say so here than after two interviews. The on-call rotation needs overlap with the rest of the team. Roles that do not have that constraint are listed on our careers page and say so explicitly.

We ask whether you would like to be contacted when a similar role opens, and if you say yes we actually do it — four of our last eleven hires came from a previous rejection. Nothing is kept on file without your agreement.

On the band position, no — it is set from the work sample and the conversations, and the reasoning is written down for you. On start date, equipment, working hours and holiday timing, yes and gladly. We do not ask your current salary at any point.

Applications close 4 May 2027

Apply in about fifteen minutes

Three short answers and your contact details. No account to create, no lengthy form, and no question about your current salary.

  • Reply within three working days, always
  • Written reasons if the answer is no
  • Decision within fifteen working days
Ask a question first

Application

Acknowledged within three working days by a person. We do not ask for your current salary, and your details are deleted after six months unless you ask us to keep them.