Principal Support Engineer

Who are Tyk, and what do we do?The Tyk API Management platform is helping to drive the connected world and power new products and services. We’re changing the way that organisations connect any number of their systems and services. Whether internal, external, public or highly encrypted systems, Tyk helps businesses drive value across the retail, finance, telecoms, healthcare, or media industries (to name just a few!) If you’ve banked online, used an app to check the news, or perhaps even driven a connected car, API’s, and by extension, Tyk, make that possible. Founded in 2015 with offices in London - UK, London - Ontario, Atlanta and Singapore, we have many thousands of users of our B2B platform across the globe. Brands using Tyk range from Lotte, Bell, T Mobile, to RBS, Capital One and Vinci. We have a varied user base hailing from every continent – even Antarctica.Our MissionTyk is on a mission to connect every system in the world. We’ve started by building an API Management platform.Total flexibility, default remote, radical responsibilityWe offer unlimited paid holidays and remote working from anywhere in the world, for everyone, Why? Tyk was founded on the principle of offering flexibility and autonomy to our employees, we believe this allows our employees to achieve their best results. It also means we can build the best possible team, location and working hours are no barrier. If this sounds like an environment that you believe could work for you then read on to find out more.As a Principal Support Engineer at Tyk, you’ll serve as a strategic and technical leader within the Customer Success organization. This role goes beyond reactive support—you're a cross-functional enabler, responsible for driving technical excellence, leading high-priority escalations, mentoring engineers, and shaping the future of post-sales support.You’ll work closely with Engineering, Account Management, and Product teams to improve platform stability, customer satisfaction, and the scalability of our support operations. You're the person people turn to when things get complex—technically and strategically.Key ResponsibilitiesStrategic Leadership & Escalation Management Proactively oversee the Zendesk queue, ensuring SLAs are consistently met, owning tickets across priority levels, and stepping in on critical, high-impact escalations. Act as a point of escalation for systemic issues, leading incident resolution and partnering with cross-functional teams - escalations would first come to you before going to Product. Work with Pod Leads to identify and resolve recurring support workflow challenges. Guide triage practices to ensure fast, accurate issue isolation across the team. Technical Excellence & Innovation Lead deep technical investigations, including complex debugging and source code analysis. Identify and implement process improvements, automation, and AI tools to improve operational efficiency and reduce response/resolution time. Maintain ticket quality across the board, ensuring product teams receive actionable, high-quality submissions. Contribute bug fixes, tooling, or workarounds to the codebase to unblock customers. Anticipate platform-wide issues and proactively work to prevent them through architecture awareness and preventive strategies. Ensure critical knowledge is documented and shared, maintaining a robust Zendesk knowledge base, debugging guides, and external documentationOperational & Cross-Team Collaboration Adhere to escalation SLAs and act as a key player in the on-call rotation to maintain 24/7 global support. Take ownership of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations. Regularly review team metrics to identify improvement areas and help set team-wide goals and focus areas. Partner with Product and Engineering to drive product-level changes based on support data and customer impact. Represent the Customer Success Engineering team in company-wide strategic initiatives, shaping the future of post-sales support. Support the evolution of internal support policies (e.g., SLAs, escalation procedures, “won’t fix” standards). Customer-Centric Engagement Serve as a trusted, senior post-sales contact for high-value customers, ensuring a seamless and proactive support experience. Champion initiatives that improve the customer journey, including better routing, issue ownership, and self-service capabilities. Take an active leadership role, ensuring timely and technically accurate responses. Advocate for the voice of the customer in internal planning, identifying feature needs or systemic weaknesses from real-world usage. Join customer onboarding to introduce the support team, understand the customer's goals, and help establish how we'll work together. Participate in recurring client meetings to discuss tickets, technical challenges, and customer needs, bringing relevant feedback back to the wider team. Continuous Improvement & Long-Term Impact Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortems for majo