Switching Software Customer Engineering Escalations

Switching Software Customer Engineering Escalations

This role has been designed as ''Onsite' with an expectation that you will primarily work from an HPE office.

Who We Are:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people liveand work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today's complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what's next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

Job Description:

The Customer Engineering Escalation Engineer (CEE) is a senior individual contributor who leads the most complex and business-critical customer escalations, with deep expertise in switching and data center networking.

In this role, you serve as the technical lead during customer-impacting incidents, driving mitigation, coordinating cross-functional teams, and communicating clearly with internal and external stakeholders. Success requires strong networking fundamentals, sound judgment under pressure, and a disciplined, layer-by-layer approach to troubleshooting across modern data center environments.

This role will require being on-site in office 2+ days a week.

Key Responsibilities

1. Escalation Ownership & Triage

• Own end-to-end technical execution for assigned customer escalations, from intake through stabilization and resolution.
• Perform rapid severity assessment, impact analysis, and technical triage to determine urgency and scope.
• Identify whether issues represent product defects, environmental interactions, configuration risks, or operational failures, and route appropriately.
• Drive clarity and momentum in ambiguous, fast-moving situations.
• Coordinate internal teams and partners to accelerate investigation and resolution.
• Navigate complex platforms end-to-end and drive targeted technical analysis to accelerate resolution.

• Analyze logs, packet captures, configs, and telemetry to isolate root cause, with emphasis on switching/data-center fabric troubleshooting (physical/link through Layer-2/Layer-3 forwarding and control-plane behavior).
• Reproduce issues where possible and validate hypotheses with targeted tests across interfaces, bridging domains, routing adjacencies, and fabric/overlay paths.
• Separate symptoms from root cause under pressure, including issues involving overlays, multicast traffic patterns, and switch port security/segmentation controls.
• Work effectively in single-vendor and multi-vendor environments.
• Understand product design and quality practices (design docs, test plans, QA signals, and product lifecycle).

• Define and communicate workarounds, mitigations, or containment strategies to reduce customer impact while root cause analysis proceeds.
• Make risk-based recommendations when no perfect option exists, including rollback or partial remediation strategies.
• Own outcomes and follow through on commitments, including after-hours decision-making when required.

• Lead coordination across TAC, Engineering (R&D), QA, Product Management, Sales, and Executive stakeholders.
• Maintain neutral, evidence-driven leadership when narratives conflict across vendors or teams.
• Ensure the correct level of urgency, visibility, and accountability is applied to each escalation.

• Communicate complex technical issues clearly to varied audiences, including senior customer leadership and internal executives.
• Provide concise, accurate status updates, escalation summaries, and recommendations without speculation or defensiveness.
• Represent the company with professionalism and confidence during high-pressure discussions.

• Produce high-quality written artifacts including escalation summaries, root cause analyses, and post-mortems.
• Identify recurring themes and feed actionable insights back to engineering and product teams to reduce future escalations.
• Contribute to knowledge bases, templates, and process improvements within the escalation function.
• Improve escalation workflows by adopting and integrating new tools, automation, and technical approaches.

• 6+ years of hands-on experience in production switching and data center networking environments.
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot network incidents end-to-end using logs, packet captures, telemetry, and diagnostics, including physical and link validation as well as Layer-2 and Layer-3 fault isolation.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting modern data center fabrics and overlays, including EVPN/VXLAN-class designs, with familiarity across control-plane and data-plane interactions and multicast traffic patterns in production environments.
• Working knowledge of engineering tools and environments, including Linux VMs, Visual Studio, Jira/Confluence, Python, and Bash.

• 6+ years of experience leading high-severity, customer-impacting incidents or escalations.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound technical and risk-based decisions in ambiguous, time-sensitive situations with incomplete data.
• Demonstrated ownership, accountability, and follow-through in high-pressure situations.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to translate complex technical issues into clear, concise, and actionable guidance for senior stakeholders.
• Demonstrated composure, clarity, and professionalism during high-pressure or emotionally charged situations.

• Experience partnering directly with Engineering, QA, and Product teams to investigate product defects and drive technical resolution.
• Ability to read code and perform targeted technical analysis to support troubleshooting and engineering escalation.
• Background in customer-facing escalation, site reliability engineering, support engineering, or Tier-4 technical support roles.
• Experience contributing to post-mortems, root cause reviews, and systemic quality improvements.

• This role involves sustained computer-based work, high cognitive load, and frequent context switching across complex technical issues.
• May require participation in critical incidents outside standard business hours on an as-needed basis.
• Success in this role requires comfort with ambiguity, strong accountability, and the ability to prioritize effectively under pressure.

• Customer impact is stabilized quickly through clear technical leadership, effective triage, and decisive mitigation.
• Escalations are managed with clarity, trust, and technical credibility across customers, partners, and internal stakeholders.
• Engineering effort is focused on the right problems with the right data, enabling faster root cause analysis and resolution.
• Lessons learned are captured and translated into sustained product, process, and quality improvements.