Senior Manager - Technical Support Engineering

About Pantheon

Pantheon WebOps Platform powers the open web, running more than 300,000 sites in the cloud for customers including Google, Princeton, Salesloft and Doctors Without Borders. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers create, iterate, and scale WordPress and Drupal sites to reach billions of people globally. Pantheon’s multitenant, container-based platform enables organizations to manage all of their websites from a single dashboard. Organizations including Clorox and the United Nations drive results through accelerated development and real-time publishing using Pantheon’s collaborative workflows.

The Role

The Senior Manager, Technical Support Engineering leads the operating model that helps Technical Support solve complex customer problems with speed, depth, and consistency. This role owns the systems, standards, and partnerships that allow a high-performing global team to do its best work.

The role includes leadership of specialized capability for complex escalations, platform reliability, proactive monitoring, on-call engineering tasks, and structured partnership with Engineering. This is an operational leadership role. The successful candidate will look for constraints in the system, identify practical solutions, and build repeatable ways of working. They will use data, customer signals, and team feedback to improve service without creating unnecessary processes.

What you will own

Global operating model

• Lead Technical Support Engineering operations across multiple regions and locations
• Design and maintain a follow-the-sun model with clear regional ownership, handoffs, on-call coverage, and escalation paths.
• Establish operating cadences that make work visible, decisions timely, and ownership clear.
• Ensure coverage, workload, and priorities match customer risk and business needs.
• Build the mechanisms that allow the team to operate effectively across time zones without relying on constant manager intervention.

Operational excellence and continuous improvement

• Diagnose operational problems at the system level, including unclear ownership, weak handoffs, avoidable escalations, capacity constraints, and inconsistent follow-through.
• Design simple, durable solutions that improve speed and quality without adding process for its own sake.
• Use service data, ticket trends, customer feedback, incident reviews, and team input to prioritize improvements.
• Own the operating procedures, runbooks, playbooks, review mechanisms, and reporting needed to make the function scalable.
• Establish clear standards for escalation quality, customer communication, Engineering follow-up, incident participation, and documentation.
• Create feedback loops that show whether a change improved the customer experience and the team’s ability to deliver.
• Use automation and AI thoughtfully to reduce repetitive work, improve signal detection, and increase the team’s capacity for complex issues.

Customer and cross-functional leadership

• Act as an escalation leader for high-impact customer issues and incidents.
• Ensure customers receive clear ownership, timely updates, and technically credible guidance.
• Partner with Customer Success, Account teams, Product, Professional Services, and Engineering on complex customer situations.
• Translate team performance, customer risk, and recurring technical themes into clear recommendations for senior leadership.
• Connect Support execution to customer trust, retention, expansion readiness, and the company’s ability to deliver differentiated support offerings.

Team leadership and development

• Build and sustain a high-performing team with clear standards for judgment, ownership, technical depth, and customer care.
• Set clear expectations for managers, team leads, and engineers, then give them the context and tools to meet those expectations.
• Coach leaders to solve operational problems independently rather than escalating every constraint upward.
• Develop technical depth in platform troubleshooting, incident response, observability, and customer communication.
• Own performance management, career development, succession planning, and retention for the function.
• Make thoughtful decisions about readiness, role fit, and team structure with clarity and care.
• Protect the conditions that allow strong engineers to do deep work while maintaining reliable customer coverage.
• Build an environment where people raise risks early, challenge weak processes constructively, and follow through on commitments.

Measures of success

The Senior Manager will establish baselines early and use the measures below to drive decisions and continuous improvement.

• Faster and more consistent acknowledgement and resolution of high-severity issues.
• Improved quality and actionability of Engineering handoffs.
• Fewer avoidable escalations and stronger trust from Engineering in Support triage.
• Reliable follow-the-sun and on-call coverage across all three regions.
• Clear ownership and timely follow-up throughout complex customer issues.
• More recurring platform patterns surfaced with supporting data and converted into corrective action.
• Meaningful contributions to post-incident reviews, reliability improvements, and reusable runbooks.
• Strong customer outcomes on the most complex and highest-risk interactions.
• A team that is engaged, technically capable, and able to operate with increasing autonomy.
• Documented workflow improvements that increase capacity or reduce avoidable effort through automation and AI.

What we are looking for

• Significant experience leading technical support, escalation support, site reliability, platform operations, or a related function in a SaaS, cloud, or web infrastructure environment.
• Experience leading globally distributed or follow-the-sun teams.
• A demonstrated record of improving support operations through better ownership, process design, metrics, and cross-functional execution.
• Experience managing high-performing technical teams and developing managers or team leads.
• Strong incident and escalation management experience, including customer communication during high-impact events.
• Experience partnering with Engineering and Product to investigate defects, improve reliability, and address systemic issues.
• Strong analytical judgment and the ability to turn operational data into clear priorities and decisions.
• Experience building or improving service metrics, dashboards, operating reviews, and reporting for senior stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to non-technical audiences.
• Working knowledge of observability, logs, traces, incident management, ticketing systems, and technical knowledge management.
• Familiarity with WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js, or comparable web application and cloud infrastructure environments.
• Experience using automation or AI to improve support workflows, knowledge access, triage, or operational visibility.
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical, business, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

What We Offer 

We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
• Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
• In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate

The base salary for this position is $164,400.00 – $205,500.00 annually for employees based in San Francisco and New York, and $147,700.00 – $184,600.00 annually for all other U.S. locations. Final compensation will be determined based on factors including role scope, relevant experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for a performance bonus and equity.

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer, and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

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