Sr. Customer Support Engineer - CIQ

About CIQ

CIQ builds the enterprise infrastructure that powers the world's most demanding workloads. From the operating system layer through AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and cloud-native orchestration, CIQ delivers the speed, security, scalability, and sovereignty that major enterprises, government agencies, and research institutions depend on.

CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the developer of the RLC Pro family of Enterprise Linux distributions, Fuzzball workload orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Ascender Pro automation. Our customers include some of the largest and most technically sophisticated organizations in the world, working across HPC, AI/ML, defense, and regulated industries.

We are a company of builders, operators, and open source practitioners. If you want to do work that matters, at a company that is genuinely changing how enterprise infrastructure gets built and run, we want to talk.

Position Summary

We are looking for a Senior Customer Support Engineer to own the hardest technical problems our enterprise customers bring us. CIQ's customers run Rocky Linux and the RLC Pro family in production at national laboratories, hyperscalers, global manufacturers, and government agencies. When something breaks in one of those environments, this is the person who resolves it. This is a senior individual contributor role: you will carry the deepest escalations, set the technical standard for how support is delivered, and raise the capability of the engineers around you.

This role sits in Customer Engineering, a team that runs on a Human First, AI-Enabled principle. Your domain expertise and your relationships with customers are the differentiator. AI removes the overhead around that work, the research, the triage, and the drafting, and it never stands between a customer and a person. You will help set that standard, not simply work inside it.

Responsibilities

• Own the most complex technical escalations across CIQ's enterprise customer base, from first report through verified root cause to confirmed resolution, including issues that require kernel-level debugging.
• Serve as the senior technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and build an understanding of each customer's architecture, workloads, and constraints deep enough to advise them rather than react to them.
• Debug Linux at depth across kernel, user space, systemd, storage, networking, and performance, on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, and cloud infrastructure.
• Set the technical standard for the support organization: reproduction discipline, root-cause rigor, and a clean separation between an observed symptom and an inferred cause in every customer communication.
• Mentor support engineers and review their technical work, so the team's capability grows instead of the hardest tickets permanently routing to one person.
• Drive customer-facing defects into Engineering with a reproduction, a diagnosis, and enough context that the fix is unambiguous, then track each one through to release.
• Contribute automated test coverage that encodes real customer configurations and failure modes, so defects our customers would have hit are caught before a release ships rather than after.
• Convert resolved escalations into durable knowledge through knowledge base articles, documentation corrections, and training content, so the next customer with the same question can answer it without opening a ticket.
• Use AI-assisted tooling to compress the research, triage, and drafting around support work, while personally reviewing every customer-facing output.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for critical customer issues and in release readiness reviews for the products you support.
• Engage directly with the Rocky Linux and broader open source communities, upstream and in public forums.

Needed to Succeed

• Deep Linux internals expertise spanning kernel and user space, systemd, filesystems and storage, and networking, with the ability to read a stack trace, a core dump, or a performance profile and form a defensible hypothesis from it.
• The instinct to reproduce before concluding, separating observed facts from inferred causes.
• Fluency with diagnostic tools: crash and kdump, gdb, strace and ltrace, perf, eBPF and bpftrace, SystemTap, and the RPM build and packaging chain.
• Experience with containers and orchestration such as Apptainer, Podman, and Kubernetes, and with virtualization on KVM, QEMU, and libvirt.
• Comfort operating across bare metal, on-premises HPC clusters, and major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Automation experience: Bash and Python at a minimum, plus Ansible or equivalent configuration management, and CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
• Excellent written communication, with the ability to explain complex technical findings clearly under pressure.
• Sound judgment about escalation and declaring issues critical.
• Willingness to use AI tooling as a force multiplier while owning every word sent to a customer.
• Experience mentoring engineers and improving team processes.
• A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and growth-oriented attitude.

Education & Experience

• Proven work experience as a senior support engineer, systems engineer, or DevOps engineer supporting enterprise, government, or research customers in production.
• 7+ years in Linux systems engineering, support engineering, or a comparable production environment, including 5+ years of hands-on Linux expertise.
• Demonstrated ownership of critical escalations for large enterprise, government, or research accounts.
• Experience packaging sources, building RPMs, and delivering through package managers, repositories, and ISO distributions.
• Experience in HPC, AI/ML infrastructure, defense, or another regulated/performance-intensive domain is a plus.
• Familiarity with security and compliance workflows such as CVE applicability analysis, DISA STIG, SCAP, and FIPS-validated configurations.
• Demonstrable involvement in the open source community is required.
• CKA preferred or required to achieve within the first 6 months.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible paid time off
• Employee stock options
• Remote work (no travel required for most positions)