Customer Support Engineer

About Sapio Sciences
Sapio Sciences is on a mission to accelerate scientific discovery and high-throughput clinical and diagnostic services. We bring together scientists, engineers, and industry specialists to build a unified lab informatics platform that helps organisations move faster, work smarter, and generate deeper insight from their data.
Artificial intelligence is central to how we innovate and operate. Within our platform, AI enhances how laboratories structure, interpret, and act on scientific data. Across our business, we apply AI thoughtfully to improve efficiency, scalability, and decision-making. It is not an add-on or future ambition. It is embedded in how we build, deliver, and continuously improve.
Our platform unifies ELN, LIMS, and scientific data management within a highly configurable environment. Scientists, laboratory professionals, and bioinformaticians rely on Sapio to manage end-to-end laboratory operations, from instrument integration and experiment setup to sample management, data analysis, and reporting. We design solutions that are powerful yet practical, enabling teams to focus on science rather than systems.
 
Position Summary
The Customer Support Engineer is the first point of technical ownership for customer-reported issues on the Sapio platform. The role triages incoming tickets, diagnoses them, restores customer operations through configuration changes and workarounds, and engages specialist teams where deeper investigation is needed.
Support owns the ticket from intake to closure. Ownership stays with the Customer Support Engineer even when the Platform Team, Tech Enablement, DevOps or Delivery are engaged to assist. The role is measured on service level performance, on how much is resolved within Support without avoidable escalation, and on the quality of the knowledge and documentation left behind.
Working Location
Candidates must be located on the West Coast, USA to be considered for this position.
Essential Responsibilities
Essential Responsibilities include the following. Other duties may be assigned.
Ticket ownership and triage
Triage every assigned ticket: establish what the issue actually is, assign a severity from S1 to S4 based on operational impact, and gather the reproduction steps, environment detail and platform version needed to progress it.
Own assigned tickets end to end, from intake through to customer-confirmed closure, including where other teams are engaged to assist. Coordinate those teams and keep the ticket moving.
Maintain accurate ticket classification, severity and hygiene so support data is reliable for trend analysis, reporting and product feedback.
Meet published Service Level Agreement commitments for response and update, and raise risk to the VP Technical Delivery early where a commitment is at risk.
Diagnosis and resolution
Reproduce reported issues in a test environment, review application logs and system diagnostics, and use AI-assisted tooling to surface similar past cases, known issues and documented resolutions.
Resolve as much as possible within Support: configuration correction, data investigation, guidance and workarounds. Refer outward only where the evidence points to a platform defect, an infrastructure fault, or work outside the Support remit.
Develop and document workarounds that restore customer operations, and confirm with the customer that the workaround is adequate before the investigation continues.
Reproduce and evidence a suspected defect before referring it to the Platform Team, and provide a complete referral summary: reproduction steps, diagnostic findings, workaround status, customer impact and service level time remaining.
Distinguish platform defects from customer-specific configuration, from custom code delivered during implementation, and from requests for new scope. Route the latter categories to Delivery through the Customer Success Manager or Account Manager rather than into the defect backlog.
Contribute root cause analysis documentation for confirmed critical defects and for recurring problems.
Customer communication
Maintain clear and timely customer communication throughout the ticket lifecycle, including realistic expectations on what happens next and by when.
Explain technical findings in terms the customer team can act on, and adjust the level of detail to the audience, from laboratory end user to customer IT.
Support customers across Sapio-hosted and customer-hosted deployments, working alongside the customer IT team where the issue sits in infrastructure they control.
Knowledge and continuous improvement
Build and maintain working knowledge of the Sapio platform, including core LIMS and ELN modules, configuration, data types, workflows, rules, plugin and webhook behaviour, and common integration patterns.
Create and maintain knowledge base articles, runbooks and troubleshooting guides from resolved tickets. Treat a recurring issue as a documentation gap to be closed.
Identify trends across the queue and raise product, documentation and process improvement opportunities to the VP Technical Delivery.
Contribute to the continuous improvement of support processes, triage standards and tooling.
Qualifications — Education/Experience
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, a Life Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
2+ years in a customer-facing technical support role on an enterprise software product, preferably a hosted or SaaS platform.
3+ years of Life Sciences experience working within or alongside a laboratory, preferably introducing new IT solutions.
3+ years of experience configuring LIMS, ELN or comparable scientific informatics software.
Required Skills & Abilities
Structured troubleshooting. Able to work from symptom to root cause using logs, diagnostics and reproduction rather than trial and error, and able to say clearly what is known, what is assumed and what is still unproven.
Strong technical knowledge of cloud-hosted enterprise applications, with a clear understanding of the difference between vendor-hosted and customer-hosted environments and where responsibility sits in each.
Ability to read application logs and query data to evidence a problem. Familiarity with SQL, and comfort reading configuration or scripting such as Python.
Familiarity with ticketing and support tooling such as Jira, knowledge base platforms and remote session tools.
Understanding of severity, service level and escalation models, and the discipline to work within them.
Able to hold ownership of an issue while coordinating other teams, without either handing it off or escalating prematurely.
Excellent written communication. Able to produce a customer update or a knowledge base article that needs no rewriting.
Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical customers.
Awareness of working with customers in a regulated (GxP) environment, including the change control, documentation and validation implications of a change.
Ability to multitask and prioritise across a live queue in a fast-paced environment while maintaining attention to detail.
Strong desire to provide excellent customer service and exceed customer expectations.
Self-starter who is happy to learn from colleagues.
Focused on activities that add value and avoiding those that do not.
Determined and persistent.
Maintain the highest standards of integrity and respect for coworkers, customers and prospects.
Physical Demands
Ability to work 8 hours per day on computers/laptops while using monitors, keyboard, and mouse.
Ability to lift boxes of 20 lbs or less.
What We Offer
At Sapio Sciences, we recognise that our people are our greatest strength. That's why we're proud to offer:
A competitive salary and benefits package
Flexibility to work remotely, with opportunities to travel
A comprehensive onboarding and training programme
Ongoing opportunities for professional growth and development
A collaborative, inclusive, and supportive work environment
 
Our People
At Sapio Sciences, our people are at the heart of everything we do. Our lab informatics solutions are powered not just by technology, but by a shared commitment to our core values — what we proudly call The Sapio Seven, aka EMBRACE:
Embrace the future
Make a difference
Be true partners
Remember why we're here
Act with empathy
Commit to transparency
Excel in quality
These values shape how we work, how we grow, and how we deliver impact for our clients every day.
Reasonable Adjustments
We are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage of the application, interview & assessment process, please let us know. We will work with you to support your needs in confidence.
Equal Opportunity
Sapio Sciences hires based on merit, capability, and potential. Selection decisions are made using job-related criteria aligned to the needs of our customers and business.
We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate based on any characteristic protected by applicable law.
The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow any other instructions, and perform any other related duties, as assigned by their supervisor.