Application Support Engineer [L2]

About Sedna

Sedna is at the forefront of revolutionising global trade, serving as the North Star for businesses navigating the complexities of international commerce. Our AI-powered platform is designed to make global trade more efficient, transparent and sustainable. You can find out more at https://sedna.com/.

Role Snapshot

Scope. Owns the technical investigation of VMS issues that need more than a documented answer, from reproducing the problem through to root cause, and owns the bugs raised to Engineering and Product until they are resolved.

Autonomy. Works independently on investigation and decides whether an issue is configuration, data, process or a product defect. Goes to the team lead on competing priorities and to the Support Manager when a customer situation needs management attention. The Support Manager escalates to the Director of Customer Success where it is warranted.

Influence. The quality of your diagnosis and your bug reports decides how fast VMS issues get fixed and how well Engineering and Product understand what customers are experiencing. You are also the technical reference point for L1 engineers.

Team. Part of the VMS support team alongside L1 engineers and a player coach team lead. You are a named escalation point on the shared on-call rota.

Role Overview

The L2 Application Support Engineer for VMS takes the problems that do not have an obvious answer. These are the issues where the customer's setup, their data, an integration and the product itself might each be part of the cause, and where you need to understand how a chartering, voyage or accounting process should behave in order to see that it is not.

This role needs someone who knows how these processes work in practice and is also comfortable working at a technical level with APIs, integrations and test environments. You will spend most of your time on tickets that need investigation, and the rest helping L1 engineers get to the right answer and building the playbooks and guides that make the next case faster.

You will work closely with Engineering and Product, and the standard you set for escalations and bug reports shapes how the team is seen by both.

Key Responsibilities

Investigation and resolution

• Own the technical investigation of escalated tickets through to root cause, establishing whether the issue is configuration, data, process or a product defect.
• Reproduce customer issues in a test environment and confirm the behaviour before handing anything to Engineering.
• Troubleshoot API and integration problems between VMS and the customer's other systems, working from requests, responses and logs to find where things went wrong.
• Use your understanding of chartering, voyage and accounting processes to judge whether the problem is the system or the way the process has been set up, and explain that clearly to the customer.
• Communicate with customers on technical issues in plain terms, and make sure they know the status and next step at every point. 

Engineering and Product collaboration

• Raise bugs that meet the escalation standard, track them to resolution, and keep the customer informed throughout.
• Act as the first technical contact for Engineering and Product on VMS issues, giving them the context to move quickly.
• Turn recurring issues and workarounds into insight for Product, so that patterns are spotted before they become bigger problems.

Supporting the team

• Be a named escalation point for L1 engineers, in hours and on the on-call rota, and explain the reasoning behind an answer and not only the answer itself.
• Help L1 engineers meet the escalation standard, and share the patterns you see in the quality of escalations with the team lead.
• Take your turn on the shared on-call rota.

Knowledge and process

• Turn solved cases into runbooks, support articles and customer-facing troubleshooting guides, so that fixes you have worked out can be used at L1.
• Suggest improvements to how the support function works when you see gaps.

About You

Essential

• Deep working knowledge of chartering, voyage operations or vessel accounting, gained from working in a maritime business or supporting software used by one.
• A record of second-line technical support or equivalent, working through problems that do not have obvious answers.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting APIs and integrations, including reading requests, responses and logs.
• The ability to reproduce an issue in a test environment and describe it precisely enough for an engineer to act on.
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort taking part in an on-call rota across time zones.

Helpful

• Experience with vessel management or maritime ERP software.
• SQL or scripting skills.
• An understanding of how changes move through CI/CD to production.
• A second language.
• Experience of helping less experienced colleagues develop, formally or informally.

No degree is required. We care about what you can do and how you work.

What Success Looks Like

• Complex VMS issues reach root cause quickly, and customers can see that the answer is right.
• Bugs reach Engineering with everything needed to act, and are tracked until fixed.
• L1 engineers escalate better and resolve more themselves because of the guidance and playbooks you provide.
• Recurring issues are visible to Product as patterns and not as isolated tickets.
• Customers describe the team as technically credible and easy to deal with.

Directional KPIs

• Resolution time against standard for escalated tickets
• Proportion of escalated tickets resolved without being reopened
• Proportion of bugs raised that meet the escalation standard first time
• Time from bug raised to Engineering acknowledgement and to resolution
• Customer satisfaction on tickets you own
• Runbooks, support articles and guides created or updated per quarter
• Proportion of L1 escalations that conclude with a documented fix for future use
• Response time to L1 escalation requests, in hours and on-call

How support works at Sedna

The team. Support is a global team across [Bergen, Athens, Cape Town and Singapore, with colleagues in Colombia], which gives us close to round-the-clock coverage and a genuine view of how customers work in different markets. Email and VMS are supported by dedicated teams, each made up of L1 engineers, L2 engineers and a team lead who still works tickets. Our customers are shipowners, operators, brokers and charterers, and everyone in the team is measured on how well they keep those businesses moving.

On-call. Everyone in the team takes part in a shared on-call rota, so out-of-hours coverage is a team responsibility and not something that falls on a few people. When you are on the rota you own the tickets that come in, and there is always a named L2 engineer or team lead available to escalate to. 

Escalation. Support engineers and Customer Success Managers escalate to the Support Manager for their product, and the Support Manager escalates to the Director of Customer Success. Any escalation to Engineering or Product has to meet a defined standard: the customer and tenant affected, the business impact, steps to reproduce, and what has already been tried. Whoever raises it is accountable for meeting that standard, and team leads review a sample each month to keep quality consistent.

Our Values

Finally, culture is important to us, so we also look for candidates who share our values:

Stay Ahead, Stay Agile

• We don’t just adapt-we anticipate change and act with confidence.
• Curiosity, data, and customer insights help us stay ahead of the curve.
• We embrace challenges as opportunities and remain resilient under pressure.
• By staying open to new ideas and ways of working, we lead the future.

Execute With Focus

• We turn strategy into action, delivering measurable results that matter.
• Every initiative counts-discipline and ownership drive business impact.
• We make smart decisions with speed, balancing pace and precision.
• Clear priorities keep us focused on what moves the needle.

Work Together, Win Together

• Collaboration is our superpower-we succeed as one team, internally and with customers.
• We co-create solutions, seek feedback, and build the future of the OS together.
• Strong relationships are built on trust, respect, and shared goals. 
• By aligning across teams and with customers, we unlock greater impact.