Technical Support Engineer

Position: Technical Support Engineer Salary: 25,000 ZAR to 32,000 ZAR Working Hours: Aligned with UK Business Hours Work Type: Independent Contractor ABOUT THE COMPANY: Our company isn't just scaling; we're redefining human risk and secure behaviour management in cybersecurity. Trusted by leading global enterprises including Vodafone, Merck, Arriva, and Hershey, we reduce human cyber risk through AI-driven automation, with Agentic AI expanding our capabilities even further. In this company, support is where the product meets reality. Every ticket represents a customer telling us something true about the platform—and every issue is either something we repeatedly answer, or a problem we solve once and eliminate at the source. We view support as an integral extension of product engineering, not a downstream cost centre. ROLE OVERVIEW: We are seeking a high-calibre Technical Support Engineer to take full ownership of our tier-2/tier-3 technical customer support function. This is a technical, investigative engagement—not a script-reading helpdesk. Operating as an independent contractor based in South Africa, you will manage customer issues end to end: diagnosing logs and error records, reproducing complex platform issues in dedicated test tenants, handing fully documented, reproduction-ready defect packages to the Product Lead, and actively closing the loop by removing recurring root causes from our product, documentation, or onboarding flows. You will inherit a high-discipline, high-efficiency operational setup powered by modern observability, AI acceleration, and proactive tenant-level monitoring. RESPONSIBILITIES: End-to-End Case Resolution - Manage the inbound queue via Intercom, triaging by severity and business impact, meeting strict SLAs, and proactively setting clear expectations for next updates. - Conduct deep diagnostic investigations before reaching out to customers: analyze error/event records, audit logs, browser console outputs, network traces, API request/response payloads, mail flow, and multi-tenant configurations. - Reproduce issues in staging/test tenants. If an issue is elusive, correlate system data across tenant IDs, timestamps, and user telemetry to isolate the failure state. - Package and escalate verified defects directly to the Product Lead. Every escalation must contain reproduction steps, tenant/user IDs, UTC timestamps, relevant log excerpts, and ruled-out variables to allow immediate engineering action without rework. - Maintain complete ownership of the customer communication loop during escalation cycles, verifying hotfixes against your original reproduction steps prior to closing cases. - Monitor proactive health alerts across tenant accounts (e.g., in Sentry), identifying failures before customers do and initiating contact with pre-empted fixes. - Track bi-weekly release cycles: review release notes on deployment day, validate altered functionality in sandbox environments, and resolve pending customer cases impacted by updates. Root-Cause Elimination & Product Evolution - Classify every resolved ticket by verified root cause: product defect, documentation gap, UX friction, environmental configuration, feature limitation, or edge-case anomaly. - Conduct root-cause analysis on repeating issue categories to identify architectural, operational, or instructional fixes. - Directly author and maintain Help Centre articles, implementation guides, and troubleshooting documentation to drive customer self-service. - Surface UX friction points to the Product Lead backed by empirical evidence (user journeys, reproduction paths, screenshots, and aggregate impact metrics). - Report on support metrics using empirical data: ticket volumes categorized by cause, trend trajectories, and high-impact preventative targets. - Leverage approved AI acceleration tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) responsibly to speed up technical research, verifying all outputs against source data prior to customer transmission. Requirements - 3+ years of technical support, application support, product support, or customer-facing engineering experience dedicated to a multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform. - Proven track record supporting technical B2B enterprise buyers, such as CISOs, IT Directors, SOC teams, security engineers, or system administrators. - Demonstrated competency diagnosing multi-tenant architectures, recognizing tenant-specific misconfigurations versus global system incidents. - Strong working knowledge of web technologies: browser developer tools, HTTP status codes, REST APIs, JSON payloads, and log analysis. - Demonstrated history of systemic root-cause resolution (e.g., authored documentation that deflected ticket volume, initiated a UX change, or caught critical bugs). - Hands-on experience with modern support and service platforms (Intercom preferred; or Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Front). - Flawless written and verbal English communication skills, with the ability to convey technical diagnostics plainly and confidently under pressure. - Proven self-directed problem-solving ability, with an aptitude for learning complex platform capabilities directly from architecture docs. - Fully equipped home office environment in South Africa, including high-speed fibre internet, dedicated backup power (UPS/inverter) for load-shedding resilience, and quality AV peripherals. PREFERRED: - Domain exposure to cybersecurity, secure email gateways, or human risk management platforms (e.g., KnowBe4, Proofpoint, Mimecast, Hoxhunt, Abnormal). - Working familiarity with enterprise mail flow systems: Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace administration, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC record handling. - Familiarity with identity architecture and directory integrations: SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM, Active Directory, or Entra ID (Azure AD). - Practical ability to write and execute read-only SQL queries. - Exposure to modern web/cloud stacks (e.g., Cloudflare, Nuxt, Vue, PostgreSQL, Sentry). - Working knowledge of enterprise compliance standards (ISO 27001, SOC 2, UK GDPR) in a data-handling capacity. - Active Intercom certification (or commitment to achieve certification within 90 days of engagement). What You’ll Bring: - Investigation-First Mindset: A refusal to guess or relay unverified theories. You look at logs, inspect configurations, reproduce the scenario, and present verified data. - Customer Empathy Without the Runaround: You never send the customer a boilerplate troubleshooting checklist for information you could pull from internal logs yourself. - Accountability & Integrity: You set expectations accurately (e.g., "I am investigating this log sequence and will update you by 14:00"), communicate transparently, and follow through predictably. - Calm, Consultative Demeanor: Composure and clarity when de-escalating frustrated enterprise customers. - Product-Minded Curiosity: An instinct to treat every resolved ticket as product feedback, asking why the problem existed and advocating for fixes that eliminate the issue permanently.