[Hiring] Customer Support Engineer @Sapio Sciences

Role Description

The Customer Support Engineer is the first point of technical ownership for customer-reported issues on the Sapio platform. The role triages incoming tickets, diagnoses them, restores customer operations through configuration changes and workarounds, and engages specialist teams where deeper investigation is needed.

Support owns the ticket from intake to closure. Ownership stays with the Customer Support Engineer even when the Platform Team, Tech Enablement, DevOps or Delivery are engaged to assist. The role is measured on service level performance, on how much is resolved within Support without avoidable escalation, and on the quality of the knowledge and documentation left behind.

Essential Responsibilities

• Ticket ownership and triage
• Triage every assigned ticket: establish what the issue actually is, assign a severity from S1 to S4 based on operational impact, and gather the reproduction steps, environment detail and platform version needed to progress it.
• Own assigned tickets end to end, from intake through to customer-confirmed closure, including where other teams are engaged to assist. Coordinate those teams and keep the ticket moving.
• Maintain accurate ticket classification, severity and hygiene so support data is reliable for trend analysis, reporting and product feedback.
• Meet published Service Level Agreement commitments for response and update, and raise risk to the VP Technical Delivery early where a commitment is at risk.
• Diagnosis and resolution
• Reproduce reported issues in a test environment, review application logs and system diagnostics, and use AI-assisted tooling to surface similar past cases, known issues and documented resolutions.
• Resolve as much as possible within Support: configuration correction, data investigation, guidance and workarounds. Refer outward only where the evidence points to a platform defect, an infrastructure fault, or work outside the Support remit.
• Develop and document workarounds that restore customer operations, and confirm with the customer that the workaround is adequate before the investigation continues.
• Reproduce and evidence a suspected defect before referring it to the Platform Team, and provide a complete referral summary: reproduction steps, diagnostic findings, workaround status, customer impact and service level time remaining.
• Distinguish platform defects from customer-specific configuration, from custom code delivered during implementation, and from requests for new scope. Route the latter categories to Delivery through the Customer Success Manager or Account Manager rather than into the defect backlog.
• Contribute root cause analysis documentation for confirmed critical defects and for recurring problems.
• Customer communication
• Maintain clear and timely customer communication throughout the ticket lifecycle, including realistic expectations on what happens next and by when.
• Explain technical findings in terms the customer team can act on, and adjust the level of detail to the audience, from laboratory end user to customer IT.
• Support customers across Sapio-hosted and customer-hosted deployments, working alongside the customer IT team where the issue sits in infrastructure they control.
• Knowledge and continuous improvement
• Build and maintain working knowledge of the Sapio platform, including core LIMS and ELN modules, configuration, data types, workflows, rules, plugin and webhook behaviour, and common integration patterns.
• Create and maintain knowledge base articles, runbooks and troubleshooting guides from resolved tickets. Treat a recurring issue as a documentation gap to be closed.
• Identify trends across the queue and raise product, documentation and process improvement opportunities to the VP Technical Delivery.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of support processes, triage standards and tooling.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, a Life Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years in a customer-facing technical support role on an enterprise software product, preferably a hosted or SaaS platform.
• 3+ years of Life Sciences experience working within or alongside a laboratory, preferably introducing new IT solutions.
• 3+ years of experience configuring LIMS, ELN or comparable scientific informatics software.

Requirements

• Structured troubleshooting. Able to work from symptom to root cause using logs, diagnostics and reproduction rather than trial and error, and able to say clearly what is known, what is assumed and what is still unproven.
• Strong technical knowledge of cloud-hosted enterprise applications, with a clear understanding of the difference between vendor-hosted and customer-hosted environments and where responsibility sits in each.
• Ability to read application logs and query data to evidence a problem. Familiarity with SQL, and comfort reading configuration or scripting such as Python.
• Familiarity with ticketing and support tooling such as Jira, knowledge base platforms and remote session tools.
• Understanding of severity, service level and escalation models, and the discipline to work within them.
• Able to hold ownership of an issue while coordinating other teams, without either handing it off or escalating prematurely.
• Excellent written communication. Able to produce a customer update or a knowledge base article that needs no rewriting.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical customers.
• Awareness of working with customers in a regulated (GxP) environment, including the change control, documentation and validation implications of a change.
• Ability to multitask and prioritise across a live queue in a fast-paced environment while maintaining attention to detail.
• Strong desire to provide excellent customer service and exceed customer expectations.
• Self-starter who is happy to learn from colleagues.
• Focused on activities that add value and avoiding those that do not.
• Determined and persistent.
• Maintain the highest standards of integrity and respect for coworkers, customers and prospects.

Benefits

• A competitive salary and benefits package
• Flexibility to work remotely, with opportunities to travel
• A comprehensive onboarding and training programme
• Ongoing opportunities for professional growth and development
• A collaborative, inclusive, and supportive work environment