Support Career Framework

Associate Support Engineer

Support Framework | Engineering Framework

Associate Support Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

Leadership Competencies

Engineering

• Assumes goodwill, seeks support and clarification of requirements.
• Capable of delivering work with clear requirements.
• Constructively raises concerns.
• Communicates in a clear, timely, and effective manner.
• Capable of adapting their messaging to technical audience.
• Develops understanding of the organization structure and processes.

Technical Competencies

• Customer Support Experience and a desire to grow Customer Support skills.
• Ability to communicate basic technical topics to customers and coworkers.
• Interest or familiarity with the following:
  • DevOps methodologies and software deployment and development process.
  • Ruby on Rails, Go, Javascript, Terraform, Ansible, Git and CI/CD.
  • Linux systems administration basics
• Learn and apply debugging techniques to resolve customer issues via email and video conferencing.
• Support a mix of Self-managed and SaaS customers.
• Create and update documentation based on customer interactions.
• Remain up to date with new product features.
• Suggest improvements to Support workflows.

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Customer Support Representative

Support Framework | Engineering Framework

Customer Support Representatives at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

Leadership Competencies

Engineering

• Assumes goodwill, seeks support and clarification of requirements.
• Capable of delivering work with clear requirements.
• Constructively raises concerns.
• Communicates in a clear, timely, and effective manner.
• Develops understanding of the organization structure and processes.

Technical Competencies

• Customer Support Experience and a desire to grow Customer Support skills.
• Ability to communicate basic workflows to customers and coworkers.
• Interest in or familiarity with the following:
  • Assisting with non product related licensing issues (expiry, lost licence, lost activation code).
  • Assisting field team with setting up customer contacts for trial support.
  • Assisting customer with contact management set up and maintenance.
  • Understanding the internal system architecture to help unblock data flow to support systems.
  • Assisting customers with storage and compute minute requests.
  • Assisting customers with authentication requests.
  • Managing GDPR requests.
• Learn and apply troubleshooting techniques to resolve customer issues via email and video conferencing.
• Support a mix of Self-managed and SaaS customers.
• Create and update documentation based on customer interactions.
• Remain up to date with relevant new product features and workflows.
• Suggest improvement to Support workflows.

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Intermediate Support Engineer

Support Framework | Engineering Framework

Intermediate Support Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

Leadership Competencies

Engineering

• Assumes goodwill, and is able to disagree and commit.
• Capable of delivering work despite periodical distractions.
• Constructively raises concerns.
• Communicates in a clear, timely, and effective manner.
• Capable of adapting their messaging to technical audience.
• Understands organization structure and processes.

• Demonstrates a personal growth mindset by initiating pairings, completing learning modules, and building product and troubleshooting knowledge.
• Understands support KPIs and optimizes personal workflow towards team achievement.
• Understands and adopts all documented support practices, processes and policies, and proposes appropriate changes to improve them.

Technical Competencies

Engineering

• Considers quality, security, and performance of assigned tasks.
• Independently plans, estimates and, delivers small and moderate solutions.
• Seeks guidance when blocked and iterates to a solution.
• Performs thorough reviews within their domain and provides helpful feedback to team members.
• Encourages participation and engages with contributions from those in the community.

• Is capable of creating and delivering clear technical replies to customer queries in spoken and written English.
• Uses strong communication techniques to understand customer situations, manage customer expectations, produce high quality ticket resolutions and create a consistently excellent customer experience.
• Takes an evidence-based approach to troubleshooting; forms a hypothesis and looks at available data to prove or disprove it.
• Knows where erroneous behaviors are likely to be logged and uses standard tooling efficiently to observe application behaviors.
• Is able to trace application behavior through GitLab codebase.
• Self-assigns issues according to the Working on Tickets Flowchart.

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Senior Support Engineer

Support Framework | Engineering Framework

Senior Support Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

Leadership Competencies

Engineering

• Communicates clearly and effectively, both written and verbally, when advising, setting expectations, or suggesting improvements. This applies whether interacting with team members, customers, or the wider community.
• Able to deliver work, even when given unclear requirements, within the context of their team.
• Demonstrates knowledge about how their group and stage fit into the larger business.
• Able to suggest alternative solutions to customer problems based on what they know about other areas of GitLab.
• Looks for opportunities for process improvements within their team and works with others to implement process changes.

• Assists others with difficult issues
• Engages with other teams to resolve issues
• Mentors teammates on debugging techniques and GitLab internals
• Disseminates their expertise to the team via deep dives, group pairings, learning modules, and/or videos
• Involved with hiring new Support Engineers

Technical Competencies

Engineering

• Contributes to the team’s understanding of quality and how it impacts the team’s domain with respect to their role.
• Able to take on large issues with vague requirements.
• Able to resolve complex challenges.
• Acts as a Coach and Mentor to others.

• Able and willing to debug and resolve complex problems
• Notices and escalates emerging issues
• Becomes involved with issues that are likely to breach due to their complexity
• Contributes improvements to documentation
• Fixes customer-impacting bugs
• Strong understanding of GitLab’s architecture
• Contributes to the support team toolbox

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Support Staff Support Engineer

Support Framework | Engineering Framework

Staff Support Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

Leadership Competencies

Engineering

A staff engineer generally operates at a team level scope, serving as the technical leader for one or more of their team’s domains of responsibility.

• Helps others across the organization understand their team’s domain and technology.
• Communicates clearly and effectively with team members and stable counterparts.
• Makes responsible decisions and evaluates tradeoffs impacting their team’s domain.
• Exhibits a deep understanding of their team’s features, how customers use them, and how they fit into the larger business.
• Improves team processes.
• Recognizes good solutions and clearly explains their merits to relevant stakeholders.
• Unblocks and enables team members and counterparts.
• Participates in processes which address complex technical challenges, such as the Architecture Design Process, as a DRI.

• Works frequently with other teams to resolve difficult issues
• Anticipates and plans for future issues that will impact Support
• Participates in Working Groups as the need arises

Technical Competencies

Engineering

• Has a broad skill-set with in-depth expertise in their team’s technical domain.
• Blends technical, product and design strategy, helping the team to be more productive.
• Represents their team as a domain expert when interfacing with other teams.
• Reaches beyond immediate needs, independently considering the longer-term, and is always looking beyond for ways to have a broad impact.
• Addresses challenges related to customers, quality, and security.
• Able to take on complex requirements and decompose them into a proposal of small deliverables.
• Engages in processes, such as the Architecture Design Process, to contribute to their team’s most challenging technical initiatives.

• Able to dig into the GitLab codebase and determine the root cause of complex problems
• Frequently submits fixes for customer-impacting issues
• Creates tooling to improve the efficacy of GitLab Support

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.