Company Description

About Salient: The company manufactures and markets video surveillance and video management systems. Salient is an innovative entrepreneurial enterprise, having experienced its initial growth in the 2010s during the analog to IP transition of cameras. Salient offers multiple versions of its systems, including a classic on-premise version, a hybrid cloud version, and a camera to cloud solution. This enables an end user to choose the appropriate version to best meet their individual needs. The company’s products are openly designed and encourage best of breed integrations from leading software providers around the world.

About the Job: The Escalations Engineer is the highest tier for support issue escalations. This is a significantly impactful role on the support team because Escalations Engineers are expected to resolve issues that are beyond the knowledge or expertise of the TSR and TSA staff. EE’s will interact with customers, successfully manage their expectations and frustrations throughout the issue resolution process, at times managing multiple different issues simultaneously. The issue management process can be protracted over several weeks or more, and EE should be able to balance all the tasks needed with efficiency. This position frequently collaborates with QA and Development teams due to the complex diagnostic requirements of the issues being addressed. The Escalation Engineer is also expected to contribute their insights to the team Knowledge Base and provide one-on-one mentoring to staff during and after the escalation process.

Key Attributes, Talents, and Characteristics for Success

Characteristics that are important include the following:

Excellent Communicator: Adept at oral and written communication across multiple platforms such as phone, text, email, and instant messaging. Not prone to over explanation, delivering clear and concise information, and adverse to providing misinformation.

Problem Solver: Effective at asking non-leading questions, excellent skills at isolating issue sources, and always able to provide more than one solution, with clear explanations of tradeoffs of each option.

Critical Thinker: Ability to go off script, assess complex issues, find root causes, identify options often from multiple perspectives, weigh risks, and choose best short term and long-term options to solve systemic issues for both customers and the business.

Empathy: Highly proficient at dealing with customers in high pressure situations, earning trust, not losing cool, and infallibly treating end user and reseller customers as you would like to be treated in the same situation.

Quality driven: Motivated to deliver technically accurate, fast help to customers in need. Not prone to ‘that is how it has always been done, but rather seeks new innovative solutions.

Team Player: A fervent desire to help those around them and improve the team. Willingness to help the team when there is down time, and ability to recognize gaps that need filling.

Teaching Mentality: Keen ability to identify gaps in team members' understanding and deliver comprehensive and understandable information to help educate and improve the team around them.

Job Responsibilities

The Escalations Engineer responsibilities include:

Final Point of Contact: Represent Salient as the final stop for end users and resellers who have technical issues or questions. Take over incidents requiring escalation from TSR and TSA staff. Remedy systems that are not functioning according to need or specification.

Diagnose Issues: Gather, interpret, and act on information provided by TSR and TSA staff as well as end users and/or resellers regarding issues. Properly and quickly assesses bugs versus configuration or environment related issues. Manage the issues, identify solutions, describe, and help implement those solutions. Manage all bugs created to final remedy to the customer.

Ticket Ownership: Take over ownership of incidents, or create new when needed, providing clear and concise details about what was reported, what was diagnosed, the steps taken to troubleshoot, and what was done to correct the issue.

Follow Up: Own assigned technical issues, and work them until they are fully resolved, sometimes across the span of multiple days. Be accountable and proactive for the next steps and consistently instigate communication with customers when committed. Call the customers before they call us.

Customer Management: Handle assigned customer issues through frequent and proactive internal and external interactions. Ensure that all datapoints needed to triage suspected bugs are collected, manage customers' expectations throughout the resolution process, establish trust with the customer through frequent communication.

Content Contributor: Identify when instructions are not clear and suggest improvements documentation. Assist with creating content for the Salient Knowledge Base in either ticketing system, wiki pages, or internal documentation.

Escalation Assistance: Proactively monitor team channels for TSR and TSA in need of help. Get involved with escalations by helping to resolve issues they are struggling with, teach them best practices, and provide feedback to management on common issues that the team is struggling with.

Subject Matter Expertise: Become subject matter expert in one or all areas of the product, able to resolve all issues presented from configuration, integrations, to environment. Consistent and accurate identification of bugs, and ability to improve TSR and TSA abilities.

Travel

Occasional travel required

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience in technical support, escalation engineering, or a similar role in the physical security industry.
• Hands-on experience in using, configuring, and troubleshooting physical security systems 
• Strong understanding of IP networking, including switches, routers, VLANs, firewalls, and subnetting.
• Experience diagnosing issues across software, hardware, and network layers.
• Familiarity with ONVIF protocols, RTSP streams, and IP camera integrations.
• Ability to analyze logs, reproduce issues, and provide detailed root cause analysis.
• Excellent communication skills for working cross-functionally with engineering, support, and customers.
• Comfortable working under pressure in high-stakes or customer-impacting situations.

Preferred / Nice to Have:

• Experience with VMS platforms
• Experience with hybrid or cloud VMS systems
• Working knowledge of SQL databases for querying and troubleshooting backend systems.
• Industry certifications such as CompTIA Network+ or CCNA.
• Scripting or automation experience (e.g., PowerShell, Python) is a plus.

Skills – Technical 

• CRM and Support Platforms: Proficiency in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, or similar technologies. 
• Windows desktop and Server OS – Expert knowledge 
• Windows/Intel based server and desktop hardware troubleshooting – Expert knowledge 
• Advanced Networking understanding, including addressing, VLAN and subnets, VPN, and command line arguments. 
• Expertise with diagnostic tools, ability to run them and diagnose their outputs, such as Wireshark, ProcDump

Additional Requirements 

• Candidates will be subject to a background check in accordance with federal and state regulations. 
• Candidates must possess a valid driver’s license and maintain a clean driving record throughout their employment. 

Equal Employment Opportunity

Salient Systems is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the

workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex,

religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other

protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting,

promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and

transfer. Salient Systems makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business

needs at the time.