Lead Support Engineer

Description

The company's UK support team runs mission-critical public safety systems for customers including Greater Manchester Police, and the team is growing.

This is a hands-on lead role that combines managing people with working the live support queue.

You need the right to work for any employer in the country where the role is hired. The company cannot sponsor an employment visa or take over sponsorship of one at this time.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of Junior Support Engineers and Support Engineers while staying active in the support queue.
• Coach and mentor the team, give day-to-day direction, hold one-to-ones, and support performance reviews and career planning.
• Set clear standards for customer service, technical investigation and ticket documentation, and monitor workload, performance, wellbeing and coverage.
• Help recruit, onboard and train new engineers, spot skills gaps and arrange training.
• Build a collaborative, accountable, customer-focused team, and plan priorities, processes and improvements with the UK Support Engineer Manager.
• Handle requests from phone, email and the ticketing system. Triage new tickets for business impact, severity and priority, check information is complete, suggest first steps, assign work, and escalate to Engineering or Product when needed.
• Balance and delegate work by priority, availability, skills and development needs. Track service levels, ageing cases and customer updates, take ownership of complex or sensitive cases, and review ticket quality.
• Investigate frontend, API, backend, workflow and data issues. Reproduce problems and separate product defects from configuration, data, environment or user causes.
• Do hands-on work: SQL where authorised, reviewing logs and monitoring data, investigating REST APIs and JSON payloads, debugging, writing small JavaScript or TypeScript scripts, and supporting data remediation and configuration.
• Implement fixes for straightforward issues. Escalate complex ones to Engineering with reproduction steps, evidence, impact assessments and notes, and take part in root cause analysis and corrective actions.
• Act as the management and technical escalation point for P0 and P1 incidents, including out-of-hours on-call. Coordinate the first response, bring in the right teams, define scope, customer impact, priority and next steps, keep customers and leadership informed, document everything, and follow up after reviews.
• Support a service running 24×7: watch support trends, recurring issues, queue health and risks; maintain processes, escalation paths, runbooks and documentation; automate repetitive work; report on response times, resolution times, ticket age, backlog and SLA performance; hand over cleanly to other regions; and work with Engineering, Product and Professional Services.

Requirements

• Previous experience managing, supervising or acting as technical lead for a Support Engineering, Application Support, Technical Support or similar team.
• Strong hands-on experience resolving issues in production software or SaaS environments.
• Practical professional experience with Java, including reading, understanding, debugging and troubleshooting Java applications.
• Experience running ticket queues, technical triage, prioritisation and delegation.
• Experience handling high-priority customer issues or major incidents.
• Working knowledge of Java and object-oriented principles, SQL and relational databases, REST APIs, HTTP and JSON, modern web application architecture, and application logging and monitoring tools.
• Ability to investigate logically and explain findings clearly, both verbally and in writing, to technical and non-technical people.
• Proven ability to coach and develop engineers at different experience levels.
• Ability to juggle competing priorities and make sound decisions in a fast-paced setting.
• Willing and able to join the on-call rota for P0 and P1 escalations.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• Supportive but accountable leadership style.
• Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills.
• Willingness to stay hands-on while managing and developing a team.
• Excellent prioritisation, delegation and workload management.
• Calm, structured decision-making during critical incidents.
• Clear, professional customer communication.
• Careful attention to detail and consistent follow-through.
• Ability to turn technical findings into short, plain explanations.
• Good judgement on when to investigate, delegate or escalate.
• Commitment to continuous improvement and sharing knowledge.
• Ability to balance customer needs, operational priorities and team development.

Conditions

Based in Manchester on a hybrid basis, with attendance at the Manchester office 3 days per week.

Participation in the on-call rota for escalated P0 and P1 incidents. Some flexibility may be needed for critical incidents and the 24×7 service.

You must have the right to work in the UK and have lived in the UK for at least 5 consecutive years.

You must be willing to pass thorough background checks and security vetting by UK law-enforcement authorities. Employment and access to customer systems depend on completing all vetting and clearance.

You must be comfortable with sensitive systems and follow strict security, data-protection and access-control rules.

You must be willing to complete a structured onboarding and training programme.

Employees must use company information resources appropriately, follow security policies and guidelines, protect the resources they control, such as passwords, computers and data, and promptly report security incidents and violations, including responding to official reports about their systems or accounts.

The company is approved to hire in Canada, the UK and 36 U.S. states: Alabama, Arizona, California (excluding San Francisco), Colorado, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia. Remote applicants must be able to do the job from one of these states. Locations may change as hiring needs shift.

Benefits

• 28 days' holiday plus UK bank holidays.
• Private medical, dental and vision insurance through AXA Health and Bupa, fully paid for you and your dependants.
• 18 weeks' paid parental leave for primary caregivers, plus a ramp-back programme.
• Income protection at 75% of salary and death-in-service cover at 4 times salary, both fully paid.
• Pension through Nest with a 3% employer contribution.
• Gym reimbursement for you and your partner.
• Equipment allowance for your home-office setup.
• Enterprise AI tools, including a Claude Code Enterprise licence.
• Spring Health membership with therapy sessions and mental-wellness tools.
• Company performance-based bonus.
• One month's paid sabbatical after your 5-year anniversary.
• Biannual hackathons, a learning budget and ongoing investment in professional development.