Senior Technical Support Engineer - EMEA (Messaging Systems)

On behalf of our client, Affinity is seeking a remote Sr Technical Support Engineer. You will play a vital role in ensuring our customers' success with NATS.io messaging system. This role goes beyond routine support and requires creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to tackle diverse technical challenges. You will directly engage with customers to facilitate sync meetings, design reviews, answer questions, and resolve their technical issues, which can span from software bugs to network configurations, distributed systems, and assisting customers in their NATS installations and expansions.

In this evolving team, you will contribute to shaping processes, develop tools, and collaborate across teams to enhance the support experience for our customers and support team. You will help establish the foundation for long-term customer loyalty and foster a highly productive team. The successful candidate will have a minimum of five years of support experience, be highly motivated, a self-starter capable of working independently, and thrive in a distributed team environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Offer direct technical assistance to customers via meetings, design discussions, and resolving issues related to distributed systems, including NATS.
• Diagnose and fix problems ranging from software defects and network misconfigurations to failures in distributed system components.
• Provide insights on system architecture modifications, configuration updates, and software upgrades.
• Partner with various internal teams to refine workflows, develop tools, and enhance the overall customer and team experience.
• Document technical processes, including maintenance instructions, upgrade procedures, root cause analyses, and incident reports.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for handling urgent technical issues.
• Validate and test solutions, while performing debugging, performance tuning, and software optimization.
  
  

Required Skills and Experience:

• 5+ years of proven experience in technical support, with extensive troubleshooting in complex environments.
• Strong background in Unix/Linux environments with command-line expertise and systems-level troubleshooting.
• Demonstrated ability to resolve critical issues and technical outages in live production systems.
• Skilled in producing technical documentation, including root cause analyses, and maintenance/upgrade guides.
• Solid understanding of networking protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, DNS) and infrastructure components like load balancers and proxies.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, particularly around concepts like consistency, fault tolerance, and system availability.
• Proficiency in scripting with languages like Golang, Python, or other similar tools.
• Familiarity with IoT setups, containerization (Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Knowledge of messaging systems such as NATS.io, JMS, MQTT, AMQP, Kafka, or RabbitMQ is a nice to have
• Understanding of security best practices and virtualization technologies.
• Working knowledge of RAFT consensus algorithms.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage both internal teams and external open-source communities.