L1 Support Engineer

This is a hands-on L1 support role - you will be the first responder for support tickets and PagerDuty pages during US business hours, triaging and validating alerts, driving comprehensive first-level diagnosis, and resolving what can be resolved at L1. When a problem is genuinely beyond L1 scope, you escalate to L2 with a well-evidenced, well-documented handoff - after a thorough first-level investigation, not instead of one., * Serve as the primary first-responder for support tickets, PagerDuty pages, and Slack help requests during US business hours

• Validate alerts before acting or escalating - distinguish real incidents from false alerts, and flag recurring false positives so alert quality improves over time
• Apply established SOPs and runbooks - with judgment - to triage and resolve incidents across the platform’s Gateway and Mesh components, where the bulk of alert volume lands
• Perform thorough first-level diagnosis - log correlation, error code lookups (4xx/5xx investigation), certificate expiry checks, traffic pattern review - using established tooling
• Execute standard operational tasks defined in runbooks - cert renewal steps, config change requests, rate-limit adjustments, service onboarding checklists
• Escalate to L2 only after comprehensive first-level assessment - with a clean, well-documented handoff (what happened, what you tried, what evidence you gathered, what you think is going on)
• Own ticket bridge and communications for Sev-3 tickets during your window; loop L2 in for Sev-1 and Sev-2 per escalation matrix
• Maintain accurate ticket updates in Jira - clear status, next steps, blockers
• Contribute to SOP and runbook improvements when you notice a step is unclear, outdated, or missing
• Perform comprehensive shift hand-off to the IDC team at end of your window - signed handover with open tickets and in-flight work

• 2-5 years of hands-on production support / operations engineering experience
• Working domain expertise in both API gateways and service mesh - API gateways (Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway, or comparable) and service mesh (Istio, Envoy, Linkerd) are core to this role, not optional; exposure to configuration management systems, MCP Gateway or protocol gateways, and load balancing / traffic routing is a strong plus
• Strong critical thinking under pressure - you can form and test hypotheses about unfamiliar failures rather than only pattern-matching against a runbook, and you know when something’s off before the dashboard says so
• Comfortable running Linux command line under time pressure - reading logs, running basic network diagnostics (curl, dig, netstat), navigating kubectl for pod / service inspection
• Practical experience with PagerDuty, Jira, and Slack in an operational context
• Reading-level proficiency with observability dashboards - Splunk, Wavefront, Datadog, Grafana, or comparable - enough to spot anomalies and pull evidence for an escalation
• Strong written communication for incident notes and escalation handoffs - you can write a clear, factual timeline that another engineer can pick up
• Discipline to apply the SOP accurately, judgment to investigate beyond it when it doesn’t apply, and initiative to update it when it needs a fix
• US work authorization; able to work Austin business hours with occasional secondary on-call rotation, * Prior experience in a 24/7 managed-service operations environment (NOC, SOC, or platform support team)
• Familiarity with kubernetes / container operations - enough to check pod status, read logs, restart a pod when the runbook says to
• Understanding of network fundamentals - TLS, mTLS, DNS, load balancers, rate limiting, HTTP status codes
• Prior work in fintech, SaaS, or large-scale consumer product engineering environments where uptime matters, * production support / operations engineering : 5 years (Required)
• API gateways : 5 years (Required)
• service mesh : 5 years (Required)

• Primary window: Austin business hours - 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM Central Time (Monday through Friday)
• On-call rotation: 1-in-4 secondary on-call rotation for Sev-3 escalations during US hours
• Coverage overlap: 60 minutes of shift-handoff overlap with the IDC (India / Bangalore) team at end of each business day
• Weekend / holiday coverage: Delivered by IDC team; US L1 team is Monday-Friday