Technical Escalation Engineer

Blink - The Employee App · Boston · $110,000–$130,000 (stated in the posting)

Apply on the company website

📍 Hybrid position: working 3 days a week from our Boston office

🤝 Reports to: Head of Support

💵 Compensation: $110-$130k

Globally, 80% of workers don’t have a desk or an office. These workers are the backbone of the global economy, the people we interact with every day in stores, on buses, in our hospitals, delivering our parcels, and maintaining our buildings. The current generation of workplace technology doesn’t fit their needs, Blink enables those people to be productive, informed, and engaged while on the move.

We've built a fresh approach to an old problem. Our goal is to be the #1 choice for the mobile enterprise, to build the workplace "super-app" that brings together in one place the people and information that matter.

We're motivated, positive and social; we're all different, but these traits tie us together. We work closely as a team and genuinely value each other's opinions. Most of all, we try and learn as much as we can from one another, through knowledge sharing and healthy debate.

💻 What will you be doing?

This is a new role and the deepest technical seat in our Product Support function. When an issue outgrows first line support, it comes to you.

Our Product Support Specialists own the customer relationship and resolve the majority of what comes in. You own what is left: the intermittent bugs, the integration failures, the data problems, the issues that only show up for one customer on one device at one time of day. You will reproduce them, work out what is actually happening, and either fix it yourself using our APIs and back end tooling or hand engineering a diagnosis so complete that they can pick it up and go.

You sit between Support and Engineering and are trusted by both. That means being the person who protects engineering time by filtering out what does not belong with them, and the person who fights hard for the issues that do. It also means making yourself progressively less necessary, by turning each escalation into tooling, documentation or a permanent fix so that the same class of problem never has to reach you twice.

Responsibilities Include:

Escalation ownership

• Acting as the single owner of technical escalations from the point they leave first line support through to resolution, keeping the ticket moving and the customer informed within our SLAs
• Assessing severity and impact quickly and honestly, so that a genuine P1 gets the response it deserves and everything else gets prioritised proportionately
• Running the communications during live incidents, keeping Support, Customer Success and internal stakeholders supplied with accurate updates so that nobody has to guess
• Holding other teams accountable for resolution once an issue is with them, chasing where needed and closing the loop with the customer

Investigation and root cause analysis

• Reproducing reported issues across devices, platforms and customer configurations, and narrowing vague reports into a specific, evidenced failure
• Digging into logs, monitoring and observability tooling, querying databases, and inspecting API traffic to establish what actually happened rather than what was assumed to have happened
• Resolving issues independently where you can, using the API and back end tooling to correct data, unblock users and repair broken configurations safely
• Investigating integration and authentication problems end to end, including SSO, user provisioning, HR system syncs, webhooks and third party APIs
• Producing root cause write-ups that are clear enough for a customer to be told the truth and detailed enough for engineering to act on

Engineering partnership

• Working alongside the rapid response engineering team as their front line, arriving with reproduction steps, logs, affected accounts and a hypothesis rather than a forwarded ticket
• Raising and shaping bug tickets so they are actionable on first read, and representing the customer impact in prioritisation conversations
• Verifying fixes before they reach customers, and confirming afterwards that the problem is genuinely gone
• Feeding recurring failure patterns back into product and engineering planning, including the unglamorous fixes that never make a roadmap on their own

Making escalations rarer

• Building the diagnostic tooling, scripts, dashboards and runbooks that let the Product Support team resolve independently what currently has to come to you
• Upskilling Product Support Specialists through documentation, walkthroughs and pairing on live issues, and deliberately handing down the things you have automated or explained
• Improving alerting and monitoring so that we find problems before customers report them
• Identifying gaps in product observability and pushing for the logging, error handling and admin controls that would make future issues self-evident

Requirements

You don't need to tick every box. This is a guide to what the role involves and the kind of person we think will do well in it. If you meet most of these and the role appeals to you, please do apply.

You must be able to work from the Boston office at least 3 days a week.

Who you are

• You enjoy the problems nobody else has been able to crack. Intermittent, unreproducible and "it only happens to this one customer" issues are the interesting part of the job for you, not the frustrating part.
• You have worked in a technical escalation, escalation engineering, application support or technical support engineering role in a SaaS business, or you have moved into one from software engineering, DevOps or a senior technical support position.
• You are comfortable in a terminal, in logs and in data. You can write SQL to answer your own questions, read API requests and responses, and use monitoring or observability tooling to follow a problem through a system.
• You understand how modern web and mobile applications actually fit together: APIs, authentication, integrations, background jobs and the places where they tend to break.
• You are methodical under pressure. When something is on fire you work the problem in a structured way rather than guessing, and you keep people informed while you do it.
• You write clearly for two very different audiences: an engineer who needs precision, and a customer who needs to understand what happened and what comes next without the jargon.
• You know when to stop investigating and escalate. You are comfortable saying you need help, and equally comfortable pushing back when something has been escalated that shouldn't have been.
• You are genuinely customer-centric. Behind every escalation is a frontline worker who cannot do their job, and that matters to you.
• You can work independently and prioritise sensibly across competing urgent things, flagging early when something is at risk.

Helpful to have

• Written code in a professional setting, in any language? Useful. You won't be shipping features, but it changes how you read a bug.
• You can read code well enough to form a hypothesis about where something is going wrong, even if you would not be the one to write the fix.
• Debugged mobile apps, push notifications or offline sync? That's a lot of what we do.
• Worked with SSO, SAML, SCIM or HR system integrations? Those are some of our trickiest escalations.
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure and observability tooling, and happy poking around in logs and traces? Very handy.
• Run or participated in an on-call rota, or written post-incident reviews? We'd like to hear how you approached it.
• Used AI tools to speed up investigation, summarise tickets or search documentation? We're keen on people who find leverage.
• Know a thing or two about internal comms or intranet tools? Useful.
• Worked in an international team, sharing asynchronous updates? Even better.
• Speak French, German or Spanish? We'd love to hear from you.

Benefits

💚 Why Blink?

You will have the opportunity to be part of something impactful, large-scale, and meaningful. Most importantly, you’ll work for a company with a strong purpose, with an ambitious and supportive team embarking on a journey most start-ups can only dream of!

Benefits include:

• A competitive salary.
• Generous equity allocations with significant upside potential.
• 20 day's leave + public holidays.
• 401(k) A generous plan to help you save for a bright future.
• Private health insurance- we'll pay for your medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Additional time off between Christmas and New Year.
• The ability for you to grow, learn and solve a variety of challenges, working in a supportive environment with smart, talented people.
• Social events (lunches, breakfasts, nights out).
  

At Blink, we're committed to creating an inclusive and diverse culture where our people feel they truly belong. We value and respect individual differences, so all applications will receive fair and equal consideration without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, age or veteran status.

More jobs at Blink - The Employee App · Software Engineering jobs in Boston