The Sustaining Engineering Team is our engineering organization’s frontline vanguard and critical escalation function. It is responsible for triaging, qualifying, and driving the resolution of complex technical issues escalated by sales engineers, customers, and our support organization.
We are looking for a Sustaining Engineering Lead who will own this function end-to-end. You are not a passive dispatcher; you are a proactive, technical driver who thrives on solving complex system anomalies, possesses a deep sense of urgency, and commands a high-agency mindset. You will lead a rotating squad of engineers, act as the organization's Incident Manager, and enforce strict metrics to ensure our most critical product issues are solved rapidly and permanently.
Operations & Escalation Management
End-to-End Ownership: Oversee the entire ticket lifecycle from initial triage to verified production deployment.
Triage & Assignment: Ensure all incoming escalations are immediately assigned to an owner with zero gaps in response times.
Strict Qualification: Enforce a structured assessment of every issue to verify reproducibility, severity, workarounds, and whether it is a true defect or a feature gap.
Team Leadership & Rotation
Schedule Management: Organize and optimize the rolling, staggered schedule for engineers rotating into the squad from feature teams.
Continuous Accountability: Ensure rotating engineers maintain full ownership of their assigned tickets until resolved, even after their rotation cycle ends.
Technical Anchor: Guide the rotating team through deep-dive debugging of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform.
Incident & Stakeholder Coordination
Incident Commander: Lead the engineering response during critical, high-severity platform outages to drive rapid resolution.
Cross-Functional Bridge: Act as the primary link between Engineering, Support, Customer Success, and Product teams, joining customer calls when high-level technical input is needed.
Metrics & Delivery Tracking
Data-Driven Optimization: Track and report on key operational metrics (Response Time, Qualification Time, Ready State) to eliminate bottlenecks.
Deployment Verification: Track fixes through the CI/CD pipeline to confirm they are successfully deployed live to production.
Qualifications & Profile
Technical Background: Strong background in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Tier 3 Support Engineering, ideally working with complex SaaS architectures, data platforms, or distributed systems.
Extreme Ownership: Exceptional proactive behavior. You do not wait for things to happen; you anticipate bottlenecks, push through complexity, and exhibit a relentless sense of accountability.
Incident Command: Proven experience managing high-pressure situations, production outages, and critical enterprise customer escalations with calm, decisive, and communicative leadership.
Process & Tooling Mastery: Deep expertise in issue tracking workflows (Jira), version control development panels (GitHub), CI/CD pipelines, and modern monitoring tools.
Communication: Exceptional verbal and written English communication skills. Ability to translate deeply technical anomalies into clear business impact for both internal executives and enterprise clients.
Savvy on using AI for detecting and triaging incidents.
What We Offer:
- The chance to be part of an innovative, fast-growing company making a significant impact in the data management space.
- Collaboration with a passionate and diverse team.
- Competitive salary and benefits package.
- Flexible work arrangements (remote or hybrid).
- Opportunities for professional growth and development.
Actian Palo Alto, California, USA Office
Palo Alto, CA, United States
Actian San Jose, California, USA Office
San Jose, United States
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