--- title: 'Sr. Customer Support Engineer at CIQ' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-customer-support-engineer-ciq-remote-f8nv977b643g' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-13' --- # Sr. Customer Support Engineer at CIQ - **Company:** CIQ - **Location:** Remote - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-08-18 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ciq/jobs/5383339008 ## Job description ## CIQ OVERVIEW CIQ builds the enterprise infrastructure that powers the world's most demanding workloads. From the operating system layer through AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and cloud-native orchestration, CIQ delivers the speed, security, scalability, and sovereignty that major enterprises, government agencies, and research institutions depend on. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the developer of the RLC Pro family of Enterprise Linux distributions, Fuzzball workload orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Ascender Pro automation. Our customers include some of the largest and most technically sophisticated organizations in the world, working across HPC, AI/ML, defense, and regulated industries. We are a company of builders, operators, and open source practitioners. If you want to do work that matters, at a company that is genuinely changing how enterprise infrastructure gets built and run, we want to talk. Must be fluent in Arabic. | EMEA/APAC preferred. ## POSITION SUMMARY We are looking for a Senior Customer Support Engineer to own the hardest technical problems our enterprise customers bring us. CIQ's customers run Rocky Linux and the RLC Pro family in production at national laboratories, hyperscalers, global manufacturers, and government agencies. When something breaks in one of those environments, this is the person who resolves it. This is a senior individual contributor role: you will carry the deepest escalations, set the technical standard for how support is delivered, and raise the capability of the engineers around you. This role sits in Customer Engineering, a team that runs on a Human First, AI-Enabled principle. Your domain expertise and your relationships with customers are the differentiator. AI removes the overhead around that work, the research, the triage, and the drafting, and it never stands between a customer and a person. You will help set that standard, not simply work inside it. Additional responsibilities include but are not limited to: - Owning the most complex technical escalations across CIQ's enterprise customer base, from first report through verified root cause to confirmed resolution, including issues that require kernel-level debugging. - Serving as the senior technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and building an understanding of each customer's architecture, workloads, and constraints deep enough to advise them rather than react to them. - Debugging Linux at depth across kernel, user space, systemd, storage, networking, and performance, on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, and cloud infrastructure. - Setting the technical standard for the support organization: reproduction discipline, root-cause rigor, and a clean separation between an observed symptom and an inferred cause in every customer communication. - Mentoring support engineers and reviewing their technical work, so the team's capability grows instead of the hardest tickets permanently routing to one person. - Driving customer-facing defects into Engineering with a reproduction, a diagnosis, and enough context that the fix is unambiguous, then tracking each one through to release. - Contributing automated test coverage that encodes real customer configurations and failure modes, so defects our customers would have hit are caught before a release ships rather than after. - Converting resolved escalations into durable knowledge through knowledge base articles, documentation corrections, and training content, so the next customer with the same question can answer it without opening a ticket. - Using AI-assisted tooling to compress the research, triage, and drafting around support work, while personally reviewing every customer-facing output. The judgment and the published answer remain yours. - Participating in the on-call rotation for critical customer issues and in release readiness reviews for the products you support. - Engaging directly with the Rocky Linux and broader open source communities, upstream and in public forums. ## NEEDED TO SUCCEED Successful candidates will have: - Deep Linux internals expertise spanning kernel and user space, systemd, filesystems and storage, and networking, with the ability to read a stack trace, a core dump, or a performance profile and form a defensible hypothesis from it. - The instinct to reproduce before concluding. You separate what you observed from what you inferred, and you say plainly which is which. - Fluency with the tools of the job: crash and kdump, gdb, strace and ltrace, perf, eBPF and bpftrace, SystemTap, and the RPM build and packaging chain. - Experience with containers and orchestration such as Apptainer, Podman, and Kubernetes, and with virtualization on KVM, QEMU, and libvirt. - Comfort operating across bare metal, on-premises HPC clusters, and the major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. - Automation as a reflex: Bash and Python at a minimum, plus Ansible or an equivalent configuration management tool, and CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. - Excellent written communication. A large share of this role is explaining a difficult technical finding, in writing, to a customer who is under pressure, without overstating what is actually known. - Sound judgment about escalation: knowing when an issue is genuinely critical, and knowing when declaring it critical would cost the team more than it saves. - A willingness to use AI tooling as a force multiplier while owning every word that reaches a customer. - Experience mentoring engineers and improving how a team works, not only what it ships. - A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving to be better attitude. ## EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE - Proven work experience as a senior support engineer, systems engineer, or DevOps engineer supporting enterprise, government, or research customers in production. - Seven or more years in Linux systems engineering, support engineering, or a comparable production environment, including five or more years of hands-on linux expertise. - Demonstrated ownership of critical escalations for large enterprise, government, or research accounts, including direct communication with those customers under pressure. - Experience packaging sources, building RPMs, and delivering through package managers, repositories, and ISO distributions. - Experience in HPC, AI and ML infrastructure, defense, or another regulated or performance-intensive domain is a plus. - Familiarity with security and compliance workflows such as CVE applicability analysis, DISA STIG, SCAP, and FIPS-validated configurations. - Demonstrable involvement in the open source community is required. - CKA preferred or required to achieve within the first 6 months - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. ## BENEFITS - Medical, dental, and vision insurance. - Flexible paid time off. - Employee stock options. - Remote work; no travel required for most positions. ## About CIQ ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: CIQ provides enterprise-grade, FIPS-validated software infrastructure for AI, HPC, and regulated environments, built around Rocky Linux and open-source orchestration tools. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; raised $26M total funding) - **Headquarters**: Reno, Nevada, USA - **Founded**: 2020 - **Founders**: Gregory Kurtzer (CEO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Enterprise infrastructure software, AI/HPC orchestration, Linux and open-source support. - **Target customers**: Large enterprises, research institutions, and government agencies requiring secure, compliant, and scalable Linux-based infrastructure. B2B, Enterprise. - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Simplify and unify software infrastructure, enabling you to craft groundbreaking technologies for the generations to come.” [ciq.com](https://ciq.com/company/about) ## Products & Services - **RLC Pro (Rocky Linux Commercial Pro)**: The commercial, enterprise-grade binary-compatible Linux distribution based on Rocky Linux. Includes LTS, FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, and CAVP-certified post-quantum algorithms. Tiered versions include RLC Pro Hardened (for CMMC, CNSA 2.0) and RLC Pro AI (pre-integrated with NVIDIA CUDA/DOCA and AMD ROCm). - **Fuzzball**: A high-performance orchestration platform for AI and HPC workloads across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. - **Warewulf Pro**: Stateless cluster provisioning at scale, ensuring every node boots from a known state. - **Ascender Pro**: An open, enterprise-grade IT automation platform for managing complex workflows across the entire stack. - **Enterprise Support & Consulting**: Direct access to Linux and HPC engineers for production support, custom training, and hands-on consulting. - **Training**: Customized training on Linux, IT automation, HPC, and AI infrastructure, available in-person or virtually. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $26M (Series A). Reported 2.75M+ Rocky Linux instances and 250k average monthly downloads. [ciq.com](https://ciq.com/) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Key partners include NVIDIA and AMD (pre-integrated GPU stacks). Investors not fully detailed on public site. - **Growth Signals**: 90% of Fortune 100 companies are reported users. Headcount growth trends show +66.7% yearly increase in job postings. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ctrliq) Amazon Linux 2 end-of-life (June 2026) provides a significant market migration opportunity to Rocky Linux. ## Competitive Advantages - **Rocky Linux Ownership**: As the founding commercial support and services partner of Rocky Linux, CIQ has direct influence and deep expertise in the most popular CentOS replacement. - **Full-Stack Integration**: Pre-validated NVIDIA and AMD GPU stacks (CUDA, DOCA, ROCm) eliminate driver matching and kernel conflicts, offering a ready-to-run AI infrastructure. - **Compliance and Security**: FIPS 140-3, CAVP, and CMMC certifications make CIQ a go-to for regulated industries and government contracts. - **Open-Source Core**: Built on open-source communities (Rocky Linux, Warewulf, Fuzzball), ensuring transparency and community innovation while providing enterprise-grade support. ## Strategic Focus - **AI Infrastructure**: Optimizing the OS and orchestration layers specifically for GPU-accelerated AI workloads, targeting the growing enterprise AI market. - **Regulated Environments**: Deepening compliance capabilities (CNSA 2.0, CMMC) to serve federal and defense sectors. - **Migration from Amazon Linux 2**: Capitalizing on the June 2026 end-of-life deadline to attract AWS-native enterprises seeking a stable, compliant alternative. - **Open-Source Ecosystem**: Continuing to invest in and lead the Rocky Linux and related open-source communities to drive adoption and innovation. ## Why Work Here - **100% Remote**: Full remote flexibility is a core offering. [ciq.com](https://ciq.com/company/careers) - **Culture of Ownership**: Emphasis on accountability, “startup mode” efficiency, and a “customer first” philosophy. - **Work with Industry Pioneers**: Collaborate with the creator of Rocky Linux and other open-source and HPC veterans. - **Comprehensive Benefits**: Healthcare, vision, dental, flexible PTO, and growth opportunities. - **Open and Humble Environment**: Culture built on mutual respect, diversity, and constructive feedback, with a “no-drama” policy. ## Sources 1. [ciq.com](https://ciq.com/) 2. [ciq.com - About](https://ciq.com/company/about) 3. [ciq.com - Careers](https://ciq.com/company/careers) 4. [ciq.com - Leadership](https://ciq.com/company/leadership) 5. 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