As highly customer-oriented software providers, we take product support very seriously. Our professional support team always tries its best to tackle any issues the customer could have encountered swiftly. In this “A Day in Life,” we sat down with Jacob – a Senior Support Engineer, to tell us more about his workload, favorite tasks, or what he likes the most about his job.

Sure! In Pricefx, we’re 3rd level support, which means we’re basically the final line for issues the customer is having. We're making sure it's getting taken care of – whether it needs to get sent to engineering to fix the software itself, or telling the company the issue is on their end. Or even whether it’s not an issue at all, and I’m like: “No, that’s it, it’s working correctly.” So, we're making decisions regarding how things should get solved.

Yeah, SRE’s – or TechOp’s, as we say – and our jobs are closely linked together. When you're talking about support, we're like a jack of all trades – we do a little bit of everything. We can do some stuff SREs can – especially the little things like restarts or changing configurations. When it starts getting a little rough and I tell myself,: “Oh, something's really broken here,” I’m going to TechOps for that.

I’d say that, day by day, it tends to be the same. Typically, I wake up, make a cup of coffee, and have that as I’m going through the ticket queue for the day. Most of the time, I start my day by replying to tickets from the other day, making sure they’re all handled. We go by Service Level Agreements (SLA), so I pick up a ticket before it expires within our agreed service time.

But one thing I really like about Pricefx is that most of the job is different. You don’t really often see the same issue twice, and if you do, maybe it's a different customer that hasn't run into it before. But the base is verifying it’s an issue and seeing if there's some corrective action I can do on my end.

For example, if it’s a coding error and I can look into the logic, and I'm like, “This is easy, I just need to switch this to this.” You can use some agency to help get that across. But usually, you’re verifying customers’ issues and seeing if you can solve it or if someone in your closer teams can. Or you go to a Configuration Engineer (CE) to get the logic changed.

It changes over time. Before we ran on bare metal servers, we saw some repeated issues. Now that most of our customers have transitioned to cloud-based platforms, every day feels like a new learning experience. Each case brings its own unique twist, so there’s always a fresh challenge to tackle, a new problem to solve, and another opportunity to expand what we know. It keeps the work exciting and never repetitive. For example, we ensure the customer's database is set up correctly, both in the QA and production environments. One of the consistent things we also have in the US is an on-call week, or the hot seat, as we call it. When you’re on the hot seat, you monitor and respond to any alerts. If there is a critical ticket, you get a text on your phone and it needs to be taken care of within hours, as it can really affect a customer’s business.

Yeah, but the good thing is during the on-call week, you typically don’t take a ton of issues in the queue, you tend to focus on critical tickets and monitor alerts.

We have a range of ticket severities, from low to normal to high to critical. The goal is to go down the list from whatever is critical and deal with the low last. You use your own judgment, also focusing on issues you know you’re able to work on vs. issues where you're waiting on other people for more information. It’s a balancing act, knowing how many tickets to pick up.

I really like digging deep into an issue. I don't mind spending a lot of time on it. I think the rewarding part is when you give the client everything you found and the solution you've come up with. It’s nice to hear them saying: “You’ve been right on all accounts, thanks for helping us out.” That’s the big one for me – knowing what I worked on personally, having ownership of it. It’s very direct.

Well, I really like that I work from home. That’s a ton regarding beneficial work-life balance. In my case, focusing tends to involve a lot of pacing. Anytime I am stuck on a problem, I don't necessarily need to be stuck at my desk. I can walk around my house, play with my dog for a little bit, and think about the issue, which could be a little bit more difficult in the office.

I’d say the biggest challenge is that there’s a whole host of different tools in the software that are interconnected, and the problems can occur at any point. Sometimes we don’t know where the issue is happening, and we need to dig in through logs. On the other hand, I really like that a lot of the clients we have are household names I use! So, I know I’m helping this concrete brand to help with their pricing.

When you’re a new hire, you’re always working with someone on the issues, asking them on calls. We have a mentorship system, and I got assigned a mentor. But at the same time, I just reached out to anyone available on my team. Now, being a senior, I tend to do most things by myself. But that’s because the team has already taught me everything they needed to. Typically it’s a team-based job, especially when we have a “war room” for a critical issue, when we hop on a call and work on it together. Someone can pop in the call, and say they had this last week and all of the sudden an issue that could take the whole day is solved in a couple of minutes.

Yeah, I think the company culture is great. Pricefx emphasizes balance, being supportive of each other, and creating an environment that you want to work in. I think being remote helps – you can spend a little more time thinking about what you want to say to people rather than just whatever the first thing that pops into your head. Everyone’s been super polite, and reaching out to other teams hasn’t been an issue: people are not hiding from messages.

I think the biggest thing is just not to be afraid to ask questions. With any technology, you're dealing with tools and technologies , you've never worked with before, and you're gonna have to ask questions. But also don’t be afraid to dig into things on your own, spending time investigating even if you don’t know what you’re looking into. That's part of your learning process.

Related Articles:

• A Day in the Life of an SRE at Pricefx
• Owning Your Career Growth at Pricefx
• Diversity & Inclusion at Pricefx: Practice, Not an Empty Policy
• Employee Well-Being: Creating a Workplace That Cares