Behind every support request is a person. Every Friday, we feature someone in support who inspires us. Today, we're featuring Pavol Závodský Kutaj – Senior Technical Support Engineer at ClickHouse. Here's his story 👇

✨ What inspired you to pursue a career in support?

I was lucky. In the last year of my graduate study (I have an MA in history), I decided not to pursue an academic career. I had no exact plan and an unfinished tour guide course in Prague. But, as a proper potential historian of central Europe, I’d been intensely learning German. Eventually, I got bored of tour guiding and ended up in German-speaking AppleCare.

Then I followed one of my team leads to the help desk at a German building materials corporation. The job got more technical, and I discovered the world of system administration and software engineering. I got hooked on the ideals of DevOps – and that still drives my day-to-day: bridging the gap between engineers, operations, and the customer-facing side of any org.

🔥 What’s the hardest case you recently worked on?

Integrations are tricky. I had a case with loads of data being forwarded into Google Tag Manager, managed by the customer. We were seeing latencies and anomalies. The assumption was that our side was OK, and it was the destination — a black box for my org — that was either misconfigured or under provisioned.

I discovered that the issue was upstream in the data pipeline we owned. It was basic cloud ops stuff, but tough to trace. As one of my mentors said: a support engineer must be stubborn.

💥 What’s the best compliment you’ve received when helping someone?

Most of my customers are data/software engineers, and I try to apply engineering best practices to operations and customer interactions. The best compliments came from senior engineers when I spotted anomalies in observability data (in Grafana/Datadog) that they’d missed — and those insights helped uncover the root cause of a long-standing issue.

The stubbornness of a support engineer pays off.

🪄 What’s your tip for prioritizing when everything seems urgent?

A bit of design thinking helps — if you see it as moving from a poorly defined problem to a well-defined solution. The first step is triage: do we really understand the issue?

Once impact is clear, context matters. Is it a strategic account at the risk of churn or on the verge of finalizing a sale? Prioritize! Non-paying trial customers affected by the same issue from a pay-as-you-go (cheap) sales pipeline can surely wait.

In sum, ensure you understand the problem and combine it with the tier/type of customer.

🥇 What company has recently impressed you with their support?

I no longer work for Snowplow, but their team is a high-energy, high-quality, well-led group. They have a combination of caring for the problems and caring for each other, which is quite rare in distributed software companies where everybody works remotely from all corners of the world.