Job DescriptionThe L3 Support Engineer for VMstore products serves as the highest level of technical escalation between Customer Support and Engineering. This role is responsible for diagnosing, resolving, and preventing complex customer issues related to VMstore products, often under high-pressure situations. When possible, the L3 Support Engineer provides solutions independently without engaging development teams, while also advocating for customer needs when engineering involvement is required.
This position requires deep technical expertise in VMstore technologies, enterprise data center architectures, high availability (HA) and Linux-based systems.
Key ResponsibilitiesEscalation & Issue Resolution- Act as the primary escalation point from Support to Engineering when customer issues cannot be resolved at lower support levels.
- Perform deep technical analysis to identify root causes and provide timely, effective solutions whenever possible without engaging development teams.
- Collaborate closely with Engineering when product defects or architectural changes are required, ensuring clear and actionable problem statements.
Product & Technology Expertise- Maintain strong hands-on familiarity with VMstore products, architecture, and deployment models, and understand their role within customer data centers.
- Diagnose complex issues involving storage, compute, networking, and virtualization layers.
Enterprise Data Center & Cloud Technologies- Support and troubleshoot enterprise data center technologies with strict requirements for high availability, reliability, performance, and scalability.
- Demonstrate strong familiarity with virtualization platforms, especially VMware, Platform9, and Hyper-V.
- Understand strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs of different cloud technologies and hybrid deployment models.
Customer Advocacy & Professionalism- Act as a strong advocate for customer needs within the organization, ensuring customer-impacting issues receive appropriate visibility and prioritization.
- Maintain a high level of professionalism and clear communication in all customer interactions, particularly under high-stress escalation scenarios.
- Provide clear guidance, workarounds, and best practices to customers and internal teams.
Linux & Systems Expertise- Apply strong Linux system familiarity to troubleshoot and resolve complex product and customer environment issues.
- Leverage experience with Linux-based product development and implementation methodologies, including debugging, instrumentation, and log analysis.
- Demonstrate sensitivity to the balance between open-source and proprietary software in enterprise product environments.
Operational Excellence- Understand and support the availability, reliability, scalability, performance, and security requirements of a large, diverse customer base.
- Participate in on-call rotations as agreed with the manager to support critical customer escalations and production incidents.
Required Qualifications- Extensive experience supporting Linux-based enterprise products in customer-facing roles.
- Background in Linux-based product development, testing, or systems engineering. Familiarity with Linux scripting and ability to look through source code in multiple languages to trace the logic and cross reference with potential error messages during troubleshooting.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed systems, virtualization, storage, and networking.
- Ability to perform source-level debugging to identify code regressions; triage defects to development teams or author direct code fixes submitted via formal code review into Git/Mercurial for hotfix and GA releases.
- Ability to conduct workflow-level failure analysis by reconstructing customer use cases, timing sequences, and concurrency patterns to identify race conditions, metadata corruption, and edge-case behavior; recreate customer issues in a lab environment.
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively with Engineering and Support teams; manage complex Level 3 escalations involving distributed filesystem integrity, kernel core dump analysis, and multi-source log correlation across large-scale enterprise storage environments.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to executive level stakeholders.
Preferred Qualifications- Strong hands-on expertise with VMstore products or similar enterprise storage/virtualization platforms.
- Experience supporting large-scale, mission-critical customer environments.
- Familiarity with hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures.
- Deep understanding of HA/DR architectures and enterprise data center operations.
- Proven experience with VMware, Platform9, and/or Hyper-V virtualization technologies.
- Hands-on experience with synchronous and asynchronous replication solutions, including their design trade-offs, performance implications, and use in HA and DR architectures.
Work Requirements- Availability to work on-call rotations as required and agreed with the manager.
- Ability to remain calm, professional, and solution-focused under pressure.
