Principal Support Engineer

Overview

The Principal Support Engineer is a senior, hands-on technical expert who drives rapid resolution of complex customer issues, leads high-severity escalations, and collaborates with Engineering, Product and external vendors to eliminate root causes, improve MTTR and elevate the customer experience. This is a high-visibility individual contributor role.

What you'll do

• Perform hands-on technical troubleshooting using Datadog (logs, traces, dashboards), API tools (Postman, cURL) and distributed log tracing.
• Lead high-severity and strategic customer escalations, providing authoritative technical direction and timely communication.
• Drive vendor ticket escalations, ensuring SLA adherence and proactive follow-ups with Microsoft, Adobe, AWS, Cisco and others.
• Collaborate with Engineering to deliver root-cause fixes, submit detailed technical findings and validate permanent resolutions.
• Partner with Product to identify platform gaps, recurring customer pain points and areas for workflow or UX improvement.
• Analyze MTTR performance, SLA trends and operational bottlenecks; publish weekly metrics and insights.
• Develop SOPs, escalation workflows and troubleshooting guides that improve global support operations.
• Identify automation opportunities and collaborate with internal teams to enhance Zendesk workflows and self-service deflection.

What you'll need

• 10+ years in Technical Support Engineering, Escalations, SRE, or related roles.
• Expertise with Datadog (log search, traces, monitors, dashboards).
• Strong REST API troubleshooting using Postman, cURL, authentication flows and JSON payload analysis.
• Experience diagnosing distributed systems, integrations and SaaS platform behavior.
• Proven ability to interface with strategic enterprise customers and communicate complex technical issues clearly.
• Hands-on experience with vendor escalation processes and SLA governance.
• Strong working knowledge of MTTR, incident management and technical support KPIs.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Zendesk or similar ticketing platforms.

Details

• Location: Mumbai, India.
• Performance expectations: resolve at least 90% of escalated tickets within SLA; engage vendors within 15 minutes of SLA risk detection; drive 40–50% MTTR improvement for assigned ticket categories; maintain CSAT of at least 90% for escalated interactions; identify and support permanent fixes for at least 2 recurring root-cause issues per quarter; deliver 3–5 workflow, automation or SOP improvements each quarter.