Principal Support Engineer

Who are Tyk, and what do we do? The Tyk API Management platform is helping to drive the connected world and power new products and services. We’re changing the way that organisations connect any number of their systems and services. Whether internal, external, public or highly encrypted systems, Tyk helps businesses drive value across the retail, finance, telecoms, healthcare, or media industries (to name just a few!) If you’ve banked online, used an app to check the news, or perhaps even driven a connected car, API’s, and by extension, Tyk, make that possible. Founded in 2015 with offices in London - UK, London - Ontario, Atlanta and Singapore, we have many thousands of users of our B2B platform across the globe. Brands using Tyk range from Lotte, Bell, T Mobile, to RBS, Capital One and Vinci. We have a varied user base hailing from every continent – even Antarctica. Our Mission Tyk is on a mission to connect every system in the world. We’ve started by building an API Management platform. Total flexibility, default remote, radical responsibility We offer unlimited paid holidays and remote working from anywhere in the world , for everyone, Why? Tyk was founded on the principle of offering flexibility and autonomy to our employees, we believe this allows our employees to achieve their best results. It also means we can build the best possible team, location and working hours are no barrier. If this sounds like an environment that you believe could work for you then read on to find out more. As a Principal Support Engineer at Tyk, you’ll serve as a strategic and technical leader within the Customer Success organization. This role goes beyond reactive support—you're a cross-functional enabler, responsible for driving technical excellence, leading high-priority escalations, mentoring engineers, and shaping the future of post-sales support. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Account Management, and Product teams to improve platform stability, customer satisfaction, and the scalability of our support operations. You're the person people turn to when things get complex—technically and strategically. Key Responsibilities Strategic Leadership & Escalation Management Proactively oversee the Zendesk queue, ensuring SLAs are consistently met and stepping in on critical, high-impact escalations. Act as a point of escalation for systemic issues, leading incident resolution and partnering with cross-functional teams - escalations would first come to you before going to Product. Work with Pod Leads to identify and resolve recurring support workflow challenges. Guide triage practices to ensure fast, accurate issue isolation across the team. Technical Excellence & Innovation Lead deep technical investigations, including complex debugging and source code analysis. Identify and implement process improvements, automation, and AI tools to improve operational efficiency and reduce response/resolution time. Maintain ticket quality across the board, ensuring product teams receive actionable, high-quality submissions. Contribute bug fixes, tooling, or workarounds to the codebase to unblock customers. Anticipate platform-wide issues and proactively work to prevent them through architecture awareness and preventive strategies. Ensure critical knowledge is documented and shared, maintaining a robust Zendesk knowledge base, debugging guides, and external documentation Operational & Cross-Team Collaboration Adhere to escalation SLAs and act as a key player in the on-call rotation to maintain 24/7 global support. Take ownership of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations. Regularly review team metrics to identify improvement areas and help set team-wide goals and focus areas. Partner with Product and Engineering to drive product-level changes based on support data and customer impact. Represent the Customer Success Engineering team in company-wide strategic initiatives, shaping the future of post-sales support. Support the evolution of internal support policies (e.g., SLAs, escalation procedures, “won’t fix” standards). Customer-Centric Engagement Serve as a trusted, senior post-sales contact for high-value customers, ensuring a seamless and proactive support experience. Champion initiatives that improve the customer journey, including better routing, issue ownership, and self-service capabilities. Take an active leadership role, ensuring timely and technically accurate responses. Advocate for the voice of the customer in internal planning, identifying feature needs or systemic weaknesses from real-world usage. Continuous Improvement & Long-Term Impact Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortems for major incidents from a customer success position, ensuring long-term resolution and process adaptation. Drive ticket volume reduction by identifying recurring pain points and proposing durable solutions at a platform or documentation level. Play a critical role in evolving support strategy to scale as Tyk grows, influencing structure, tooling, and hiring decisions. Requirements What We’re Looking For Extensive experience in technical support or success engineering roles, with proven leadership in complex escalations and systemic improvements. Strong background in dealing with large Enterprise customers. Strong background in an API / APIM driven environment. Someone who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty in new technologies. A great senior engineer not only knows the Tyk component/technologies but they often will have to know and set up other technologies that the customer uses, i.e kubernetes, docker, databases, SSO/IDPs etc Strong debugging skills—able to read source code and diagnose issues in distributed systems. Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, across technical and non-technical stakeholders. Demonstrated ability to lead without authority, influencing product, engineering, and customer success peers. Passion for operational excellence, automation, and scalable support strategies. A growth mindset—you lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to continuously improve yourself and those around you. Comfort working with different region customers, with willingness to participate in rotational on-call shifts (including weekends). Benefits Here’s why you should join us: Everyone has unlimited paid holidays. We have total flexibility in hours, as we believe creativity flows better when our people are given freedom to decide when they are most productive. Everyone is unique after all. Employee share scheme Generous maternity and paternity leave Volunteering Days Company retreats Employee Wellbeing platform We all share the same vision - we value authenticity, respect, responsibility, independence, honesty, diversity and inclusion and most importantly treating others how you wish to be treated. We look for like-minded people who bring their personalities to work everyday, strive to achieve their personal goals and who are willing to challenge the way we do things, why? - to make what we do even better! Our values tell the story of Tyk - here’s how: It’s ok to screw up! We’ve found that it’s often the ‘stupid’ or unexpected ideas that turn out to be the successful ones - so try it, at least we can say we have! The only stupid idea, is the untested one! It’s in our DNA - starting a business with founders 12 hours apart, giving our gateway away for free - sure, we did that, and we’d do it again! Trust starts with you - make it count! Trust is a two-way street - instil it from day one! Assume best intent! We have each other’s back - we’re all on the same team. Think before you speak or act. Make things better! Always try to leave things better than when you found them - change is constant, inevitable and embraced! Be that change we want to see. What’s it like to work here?!