Support Engineering Lead – Data & AI Platforms

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.

Engagement details:

• Location: Auburn Hills, MI
• Working model: Hybrid
• Start date: ASAP
• 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

Next steps:

• Press "Apply"
• We will review your application
• If qualified, you will be accepted into the network and can be considered for this and similar positions & projects