Support Engineering Lead – Data & AI Platforms

Hashlist; Auburn Hills (MI); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Hashlist is seeking a Support Engineering Lead for Data & AI Platforms in Auburn Hills, MI. This hands-on IC leadership role owns Level-1 support for enterprise Big Data and AI platforms, blending incident triage with building processes, tooling, and automation to improve support performance.

The role combines day-to-day incident management with driving observability, runbooks, and knowledge bases, while mentoring other engineers and collaborating with platform, SRE, and product teams.

Qualifications

• Experience supporting Big Data and AI platforms.
• Fluent in English.
• Strong incident management and RCA skills.

Responsibilities

• Act as primary L1 responder for incidents, alerts, and user issues across Big Data and AI platforms, performing triage, impact assessment, and prioritization.
• Resolve known and common issues using runbooks, tooling, and automation, escalating complex issues to L2/L3 with clear diagnostics and context
• Own issue tracking, follow-ups, and closure to completion
• Lead L1-level incident response and coordination, ensuring clear, timely communication throughout
• Participate in post-incident reviews and root cause discussions, identifying recurring failure patterns and preventive actions
• Establish and continuously improve L1 support processes — intake and triage, severity definitions, escalation paths, SLAs, and response expectations
• Design, document, and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and knowledge bases
• Define and implement support tooling: ticketing/incident management, alerting and monitoring integrations, and operational dashboards
• Drive automation of repetitive support tasks to reduce manual effort and MTTR
• Partner with platform engineering, SRE, and product teams to improve operability and feed operational insights into the roadmap
• Act as a trusted point of contact for platform users and mentor other support engineers

Skills

Big Data platforms

Kubernetes

Python

Bash

Incident management

Root cause analysis

English communication

Observability tooling

Tools

PagerDuty

Opsgenie

Jira

ServiceNow

Job description

We are looking for a Support Engineering Lead – Data & AI Platforms. This is a hands‑on IC leadership role owning Level‑1 support for enterprise Big Data and AI platforms at a major technology player, combining day‑to‑day incident triage with designing the processes, tooling, and automation that make support better.

• Location: Auburn Hills, MI
• Working model: Hybrid
• Employment type: Permanent contract via EOR, or freelance

Responsibilities:

• Act as primary L1 responder for incidents, alerts, and user issues across Big Data and AI platforms, performing triage, impact assessment, and prioritization
• Resolve known and common issues using runbooks, tooling, and automation, escalating complex issues to L2/L3 with clear diagnostics and context
• Own issue tracking, follow‑ups, and closure to completion
• Lead L1-level incident response and coordination, ensuring clear, timely communication throughout
• Participate in post‑incident reviews and root cause discussions, identifying recurring failure patterns and preventive actions
• Establish and continuously improve L1 support processes — intake and triage, severity definitions, escalation paths, SLAs, and response expectations
• Design, document, and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and knowledge bases
• Define and implement support tooling: ticketing/incident management, alerting and monitoring integrations, and operational dashboards
• Drive automation of repetitive support tasks to reduce manual effort and MTTR
• Partner with platform engineering, SRE, and product teams to improve operability and feed operational insights into the roadmap
• Act as a trusted point of contact for platform users and mentor other support engineers

Qualifications:

• Strong hands‑on experience supporting Big Data and AI platforms (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Airflow, data lakes/warehouses, ML training/inference, GPU runtimes)
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms — AWS is a must; GCP and Azure a plus
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads
• Proficiency in troubleshooting using logs, metrics, and dashboards across an observability stack
• Scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, etc.)
• Proven experience establishing or improving support processes
• Strong incident management and root cause analysis skills
• Ability to balance operational execution with long‑term improvements
• Clear written and verbal communication skills in English
• Nice to have: platform/internal developer platform experience, SRE/DevOps/Production Engineering exposure, support tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow), and familiarity with ITIL concepts