Founding Support Engineer

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Nuclearn

Founding Support Engineer

Phoenix, AZ
Full Time
Paid
  • Responsibilities

    Founding Support Engineer

    Why Nuclearn.ai

    Nuclearn.ai builds AI-powered software for the nuclear and utility industries—tools that keep critical infrastructure reliable, efficient, and safe. Our software integrates AI-driven workflow, documentation, and research automation, and is already used at 60+ nuclear reactors across North America. You'll ship production code operators and engineers rely on every day.

    We're growing quickly, expanding our team and our Phoenix HQ. The work is consequential: what you build helps real plants run safer and smarter.

    Eligibility: U.S. citizenship or permanent residency (green card) is required due to DOE export compliance.

    What You'll Do

    • Own technical support end-to-end Be the first line of defense for technical issues escalated from our Customer Success team. Diagnose problems, distinguish real bugs from configuration or user errors, and route confirmed defects to engineering with clear reproduction steps and impact assessment.
    • Monitor platform health proactively Keep eyes on alerts, monitoring dashboards, and customer instance health. Catch issues before customers do. Assess customer impact quickly and communicate status to the right people.
    • Bridge the gap between customers and engineering Translate customer-reported symptoms into actionable technical information. Shield engineering from noise so they can focus on building, while making sure nothing critical gets dropped.
    • Build the support playbook from scratch Define triage workflows, internal SLAs, escalation paths, and a knowledge base. You're founding this function - what you build becomes the standard as the team grows.

    You will operate as a senior individual contributor with high autonomy and direct influence across engineering, customer success, and customer environments.

    Examples of problems you might own in your first 90 days

    • Stand up a triage and ticketing workflow that replaces ad-hoc Discord/Slack escalations with a structured, trackable process, including severity definitions and response time expectations.
    • Audit the current alert stack and monitoring tools, identify gaps, and establish a daily health check routine across all customer instances so issues are caught before CSEs or customers report them.
    • Investigate and resolve a backlog of open customer-reported issues, documenting root causes and building an internal knowledge base that reduces repeat escalations.

    What Makes You a Great Fit

    • 2+ years in a technical support, support engineering, or site reliability role at a software company
    • Comfortable reading logs, navigating Linux environments, and poking around application infrastructure to isolate issues
    • Experience with containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud or on-prem deployments
    • Strong written communication, you can document a bug clearly enough that an engineer can act on it without a follow-up conversation
    • Ability to operate independently in a fast-moving, high-ownership startup environment

    You are hands-on. You stay calm under pressure. You take pride in closing the loop. You'd rather dig into a problem yourself than pass it along.

    Nice To Have (not Required)

    • Experience in utility IT, energy infrastructure, or other regulated industries
    • Familiarity with monitoring/observability tools (PagerDuty, Datadog, BetterUptime, or similar)
    • Experience supporting on-prem or air-gapped environments
    • Background in customer-facing technical roles at an early-stage startup

    Impact You'll Have (near-term roadmap)

    • Establish Nuclearn's first structured technical support function: triage, tracking, and resolution workflows that scale
    • Dramatically reduce engineering interrupt load so the team can ship faster
    • Improve customer experience by cutting time-to-resolution on technical issues
    • Create the foundation for a support org that grows with the company

    Compensation & Benefits

    • Base salary: $84k - $161k
    • Equity: 0.01% - 0.02%
    • Benefits: Unlimited PTO, health/dental/vision insurance, 4% 401k match

    Work Model & Schedule

    • Full-time, salaried]
    • Mon–Fri hybrid (Wed remote); expectation is ≥80% in-office (Phoenix HQ)

    How We Hire (fast, respectful, practical)

    1. 15-min intro with the founder/hiring manager to trade context and assess mutual fit
    2. Practical work sample (60 min; a real triage scenario from our stack)
    3. 3 hr Team meet + collaboration session (how you communicate across CS and engineering)

    We aim to move from first chat to decision quickly.