Support Engineering Manager

ABOUT THE TEAM

Bestow's Engineering team owns all technology for Bestow and the Bestow Platform, serving employees, consumers, and enterprise customers. Our major functional groups are product engineering, infrastructure, IT, data and analytics, and program management, and we work closely with product management and design to define and prioritize the roadmap.

Support Engineering is the engineering team our carrier and enterprise partners feel most directly. As the Support Engineering Manager you will lead a team of Technical Solutions Engineers who triage, diagnose, and resolve production issues across the entire Bestow Platform: enrollment and underwriting, policy administration, billing and payments, documents and communications, and the admin tooling our internal and partner users depend on every day. Our systems run on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform and are built from microservices written primarily in Go and Python that integrate using gRPC, REST, and async messaging patterns.

Your team is the primary and often final technical contact for our current Life Insurance partners and the ones we onboard next. You will own the engineering support queue and partner-facing ticket intake end to end, meet partner SLAs, run on-call, declare and drive incidents, and convert recurring pain into permanent fixes, either by shipping the fix yourself or by getting it onto a module team's roadmap with the data to justify it.

A key focus for this role is fully operationalizing Support Engineering: replacing tribal knowledge with documented, measured, and automated process, reducing manual intervention and high-risk direct data manipulation in production, and building the tooling, runbooks, and self-service capabilities that let the team scale with the partner book rather than with ticket volume. This role is open to remote candidates.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

This is a hands-on management role with direct reports, spending roughly 20% of your time contributing production-level code. Bestow is looking for a Support Engineering Manager to contribute in the following ways:

• Stay hands-on in the code. Clone any Bestow repository, reproduce a partner-reported defect, and open a pull request without waiting on the owning team.

• Debug across service boundaries. Use observability, structured logging, session replay, and warehouse data to get from symptom to root cause, and represent operability and supportability in pull request, design, and architecture reviews.

• Command incidents. Act as incident commander or senior technical responder for production incidents, driving to mitigation and then to a durable fix.

• Own the support queue end to end. Intake, triage, prioritization, escalation, resolution, and closure quality for the engineering support queue and partner ticket intake.

• Define and defend the metrics. Instrument and report SLA attainment per partner, independent resolution rate, time-to-triage, escalation rate, and recurring-issue volume.

• Replace tribal knowledge with process. Publish discoverable documentation and runbooks so any engineer on the team can resolve any category of ticket, and run a sustainable on-call rotation with real coverage plans for holidays, PTO, and surge events.

• Automate the repeatable. Eliminate categories of tickets through self-service tooling, admin capability, and workflow automation rather than absorbing them as headcount, and put guardrails around high-risk manual production data changes.

• Turn ticket data into funded roadmap. Carry a prioritized product-gap backlog into planning forums with the occurrence counts, complexity assessment, and customer impact that get work funded.

• Represent Bestow to partners. Handle escalation calls, root cause reviews, and partner syncs without extensive prep. Explain defects and remediation plans to carrier engineering, operations, and executive audiences with equal clarity, and manage expectations honestly, including saying no with reasoning.

• Build the escalation model. Establish severity definitions, escalation paths, and cross-team response patterns that make response predictable instead of improvised.

• Develop the team. Write growth plans against the Technical Solutions Engineer ladder, coach engineers arriving with domain depth but no technical foundation and vice versa, and champion GenAI developer tooling with reusable agent skills and workflows.

• Own launch readiness. Sign off on go-to-market readiness for every product and carrier launch and ensure the team is trained on new functionality before it reaches production.

WHO YOU ARE

• Technically credible and operationally disciplined. You are equally at home in a code review and on a call with a carrier executive, and you would rather build the system that prevents the fire than be praised for putting it out.

• Experienced. 5+ years in the software industry with at least 3 years managing engineers while keeping your coding skills current. Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

• An operator, not a passenger. You have built the queue, the metrics, the runbooks, and the automation for a technical support, production support, or SRE-adjacent function, not simply worked inside someone else's.

• Fluent in the stack. Professional experience with Go, Python, or TypeScript. Familiar with modern scalable architectures, PostgreSQL or another relational database, investigative SQL (BigQuery is a plus), and API tooling such as Protocol Buffers, gRPC, Swagger, or OpenAPI.

• Observability-literate. Working fluency with APM, structured logging, and session replay, and able to build the dashboards and alerts your team needs.

• Practiced in formal incident management. Declaration, command, communication, and follow-up using tooling such as incident.io or PagerDuty.

• A working AI practitioner. You use GenAI developer tools to stay hands-on across unfamiliar, multi-repository codebases, and you coach engineers on using AI to accelerate diagnosis, documentation, and automation while holding AI-generated code to platform design principles and compliance frameworks.

• An exceptional communicator. You can brief a carrier's operations leadership and a backend engineer on the same defect within the same hour and both will get what they need, and you keep composure and credibility in front of customers during active incidents.

• Experienced with regulated enterprise customers. You have supported enterprise or B2B2C customers operating under contractual SLAs. Insurance experience is preferred; fintech, healthcare, or another regulated industry is relevant.

TOTAL REWARDS

At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits include:

• Competitive salary and equity based on role

• Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs

• 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing

• Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote

• Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting

• Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives