Lead Support Engineer

What You'll Do

Mark43 is seeking a hands-on Lead Support Engineer to lead our growing UK Support team, which supports mission-critical public safety systems for customers including Greater Manchester Police (GMP).

This role combines people leadership with active participation in day-to-day technical support. You will manage a team of Junior Support Engineers and Support Engineers while remaining closely involved in the support queue—responding to tickets, conducting initial triage, setting priorities, delegating work, and supporting complex investigations.

You will be responsible for ensuring that customer issues are handled efficiently, professionally, and in line with agreed service levels. You will also act as an escalation point for critical P0 and P1 incidents and participate in an on-call rota.

The successful candidate will be a confident people manager with a strong technical support background. You should be comfortable switching between coaching team members, coordinating incident response, communicating with customers, and investigating technical issues directly.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership and Management

• Manage, support, and develop a team of Junior Support Engineers and Support Engineers.
• Provide day-to-day direction, coaching, mentoring, and technical guidance.
• Hold regular one-to-one meetings and support performance reviews and career development planning.
• Set clear expectations and ensure consistent standards of customer service, technical investigation, and ticket documentation.
• Monitor team workload, performance, wellbeing, and operational coverage.
• Support the recruitment, onboarding, and training of new team members.
• Identify knowledge or skills gaps and coordinate appropriate training and development.
• Foster a collaborative, accountable, and customer-focused team culture.
• Work closely with the UK Support Engineer Manager on team planning, priorities, processes, and operational improvements.

Ticket Management and Triage

• Actively participate in the support queue and serve as a point of contact for customer requests received by phone, email, and the ticketing system.
• Perform initial triage of incoming tickets, including: assessing business impact, severity, and priority; confirming that sufficient information has been provided; identifying immediate troubleshooting or containment steps; assigning tickets to the appropriate team member; escalating issues when specialist Engineering or Product input is required.
• Balance and delegate work based on ticket priority, engineer availability, skills, and development needs.
• Monitor ticket progress, service levels, customer communications, and ageing cases.
• Take ownership of complex, high-priority, or sensitive support cases where appropriate.
• Ensure customers receive clear, accurate, and timely updates.
• Review ticket quality and ensure investigations, decisions, and resolutions are properly documented.

Technical Support and Investigation

• Investigate and resolve technical issues across frontend, API, backend, workflow, and data-related areas.
• Reproduce reported problems and distinguish product defects from configuration, data, environment, or user-related issues.
• Perform hands-on technical work, including: writing and executing SQL queries where authorised; reviewing application logs and monitoring information; investigating REST APIs and JSON payloads; debugging application behaviour; developing small JavaScript or TypeScript scripts; supporting data remediation and configuration activities.
• Propose and, where appropriate, implement solutions for straightforward technical issues.
• Escalate complex issues to Engineering with clear reproduction steps, supporting evidence, impact assessments, and investigation notes.
• Participate in root cause analysis and help track corrective and preventative actions.
• Contribute to improvements in product reliability, supportability, and customer experience.

Major Incident and On-Call Responsibilities

• Act as a management and technical escalation point for P0 and P1 incidents.
• Participate in an on-call rota to provide support when critical incidents require escalation outside normal working hours.
• Coordinate the initial response to major incidents, ensuring the appropriate internal teams and stakeholders are engaged.
• Help establish the incident’s scope, customer impact, priority, and next actions.
• Maintain clear and timely communication with customers, support leadership, Engineering, and other stakeholders.
• Ensure incident activity, decisions, updates, and actions are accurately documented.
• Support post-incident reviews and follow through on agreed improvements.
• Exercise sound judgement under pressure while maintaining a calm and structured approach.

Support Operations and Continuous Improvement

• Support the delivery of effective operational coverage for a service operating 24×7.
• Monitor support trends, recurring issues, queue health, and operational risks.
• Help define, maintain, and improve support processes, escalation paths, runbooks, and technical documentation.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive work and improve team efficiency.
• Track and report on operational measures such as response times, resolution times, ticket age, backlog, and service-level performance.
• Collaborate with Support teams in other regions to ensure effective handovers and consistent global support.
• Work with Engineering, Product, Professional Services, and other internal teams to improve issue resolution and customer outcomes.

What You'll Need

• Previous experience managing, supervising, or acting as a technical lead for a Support Engineering, Application Support, Technical Support, or similar team.
• Strong hands-on experience investigating and resolving issues within a production software or SaaS environment.
• Practical professional experience with Java, including the ability to read, understand, debug, and troubleshoot Java applications.
• Experience managing ticket queues, conducting technical triage, prioritising work, and delegating tickets.
• Experience handling high-priority customer issues or major incidents.
• Working knowledge of: Java and object-oriented programming principles; SQL and relational databases; REST APIs, HTTP, and JSON; modern web application architecture; application logging and monitoring tools.
• Ability to investigate technical issues logically and communicate findings clearly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and develop engineers with different levels of experience.
• Ability to manage competing priorities and make sound decisions in a fast-paced environment.
• Willingness and ability to participate in an on-call rota for P0 and P1 escalations.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant professional experience.

Key Skills and Attributes

• Supportive and accountable leadership style.
• Strong technical troubleshooting and analytical skills.
• A willingness to remain hands-on while managing and developing a team.
• Excellent prioritisation, delegation, and workload-management skills.
• Calm and structured decision-making during critical incidents.
• Clear and professional customer communication.
• Strong attention to detail and consistent follow-through.
• Ability to translate technical findings into concise, accessible explanations.
• Good judgement when determining when to investigate, delegate, or escalate.
• Commitment to continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.
• Ability to balance customer needs, operational priorities, and team development.

Location and Working Model

• The role is based in Manchester.
• This is a hybrid position requiring attendance at the Manchester office three days per week.
• The role includes participation in an on-call rota for escalated P0 and P1 incidents.
• Some flexibility may be required to support critical incidents and a service operating 24×7.

Additional Requirements

• Must have the right to work in the UK.
• Must have been resident in the UK for a minimum of five consecutive years.
• Must be willing and able to undergo stringent background checks and security vetting conducted by UK law-enforcement authorities.
• Employment and access to customer systems are contingent upon successfully completing all required vetting and clearance processes.
• Must be comfortable working with sensitive systems and following strict security, data-protection, and access-control requirements.
• Must be willing to participate in a structured onboarding and training programme.

What We Offer

• 28 days’ holiday plus UK bank holidays.
• Private medical, dental, and vision insurance through AXA Health and Bupa, fully paid for you and your dependants.
• 18 weeks’ paid parental leave for primary caregivers, plus a ramp-back programme.
• Income protection of 75% of salary and death-in-service cover of four times salary, fully paid.
• Pension through Nest with a 3% employer contribution.
• Gym reimbursement for you and your partner.
• Equipment allowance to support your home-office setup.
• Enterprise AI tooling, including Claude Code Enterprise licence.
• Spring Health membership, including therapy sessions and mental-wellness tools.
• Company performance-based bonus.
• One month’s paid sabbatical upon reaching your five-year anniversary.
• Biannual hackathons, a learning budget, and ongoing investment in your professional development.