Afternoon Advanced Protection Solutions Jobs in Michigan

Advanced MSP Systems Engineer - Tier 3

(A.K.A. When Our Heavy-Hitters Need a Heavy-Hitter)

Key Responsibilities

• Own and resolve the high-level escalations that get past our Tier 2 team, serving as the final internal escalation point and solving complex, multi-system problems right the first time.
• Act as the technical lead in our sales process: perform discovery and assessments, design solutions, and build accurate scopes alongside our sales team (never client-facing solo).
• Mentor and level up the Tier 1 and Tier 2 team, build documentation and automation, and steadily reduce how often anything needs to reach your desk at all.

Job Summary

At INC Systems, we have been helping businesses and non-profits wrangle their technology since 2004. We are a Managed Service Provider, but the thing that actually makes us different is not the stack we deploy, it is that we put people first and technology second. We even put it on the wall: Technology Done Different.

This is the most senior technical seat we have. When a problem gets past our Tier 2 team, and our Tier 2 team is good, so that does not happen often, it comes to you. You are the final escalation point, the one who solves the thing nobody else here can solve, and solves it right the first time. You are also the technical brain in our sales process and the person who quietly makes every technician around you better.

We are not looking for someone still building a reputation. We are looking for someone who already has one. You have the scars, the judgment, and the rare ability to explain all of it without making anyone feel small. You know that being the smartest person in the room is worthless if you are also the bottleneck. If you get a quiet satisfaction from turning a four-alarm outage into a non-event, from scoping a project so accurately that cutover day is boring, and from watching a junior tech finally nail the thing you taught them last month, we should talk.

A Day in the Life

Your day starts with the same 15-minute huddle as everyone else's, because nobody is too senior for the huddle. Overnight alerts, project deadlines, and whose turn it is to defend an indefensible take at lunch. Then you get to work.

Here is the honest part: there is no typical day in this seat. Unlike the rest of the support team, your calendar is not carved into tidy, predictable blocks. Some days you spend start to finish buried in one nasty problem or one big project, and that is exactly where you should be. Other days you bounce across half a dozen things before lunch. The one constant is that you are always pointed at the highest-value work in front of you, wherever that happens to be that day. So read what follows as one possible shape of a day, not a schedule.

With that said, one possible day. A ticket lands that has been bouncing around Tier 2 for a day. Intermittent, multi-system, the kind where the symptom and the cause live in different buildings. You do not panic, because you have met this animal before in a dozen costumes. You pull the threads methodically, find the root cause hiding three layers down, fix it, verify it, and then do the part that matters most: you write it up and walk the Tier 2 tech through the reasoning, so next time this shows up, it never reaches your desk.

Mid-morning, you ride along with one of our salespeople on a prospect assessment. This part is mostly ears, not mouth. The salesperson runs the conversation and owns the relationship. Your job is to listen hard and learn everything you can about where this business actually hurts: what is slow, what keeps breaking, what keeps the owner up at night. Those pains are the raw material for the solution we will design and propose, so the better you absorb now, the better we can solve later. You speak up when a technical question genuinely needs your answer, but you are not there to run the meeting. You are there to understand it.

Your mentorship hour is on the calendar, and you keep it, because a stronger team is part of the job and not a distraction from it. Today it is a whiteboard session on Conditional Access with a Tier 1 who is ready to level up. You ask more than you answer. They leave with the fix and, more importantly, the reasoning behind it.

Lunch happens. Someone makes a confident claim about a movie nobody else has seen. A science debate breaks out and gets weirdly heated. A dart goes astray. The Nerf situation resolves itself, as it always does.

Afternoon is build-and-improve mode. You finish a solution design and hand it to a Tier 2 to implement, with a checklist clean enough that cutover day is gloriously dull. Then you spend an hour on the part of the job that feels like a hobby: there is a repetitive task quietly stealing hours from the team every week, and you have an automation half-sketched that is going to make it disappear. You write up the pitch with the time savings and the risks both laid out, because you have learned the hard way that clever and wise are not always the same thing, especially when a client environment is on the other end of it.

By end of day, you have made a hard problem look easy, learned exactly where a prospect hurts, made a technician better, and taken a bite out of the team's busywork. The hard problems are quieter than they were this morning. Tomorrow might look nothing like today, and that is the gig.

What You'll Be Doing (AKA Your Superpowers)

The Final Escalation Point: Where the Buck Stops

• Own and resolve the escalations that genuinely require senior expertise, accurately and the first time. The ones that get past Tier 2 (not many, by design) are yours.
• Serve as the final internal escalation point, and own vendor escalations beyond what Tier 2 can drive.
• Back up Tier 1 and Tier 2 on complex issues without taking the keyboard away from them.
• Close It Twice: every resolution ends by closing the ticket and closing the knowledge gap, with a knowledge base article or a teach-back. A fix that lives only in your head is just a future escalation with a delay timer on it.

Sales Engineering: The Technical Truth in the Room

• Perform technical discovery and assessments of prospect environments. In the room you are mostly listening and learning where the business hurts, and you speak only when a specific technical question needs your answer.
• Design the right solution and build the scope and bill of materials (we run QuoteWerks).
• Pair with a member of our sales team through the recommendation. You bring the technical credibility, they own the relationship and the close. You are never client-facing solo.
• Design honestly. Sometimes the right answer is smaller than the proposal everyone hoped for, and the truthful recommendation is the one you hand the sales team to take to the client. Recommending the right fit, even when it is a competitor's, is one of our core promises, and it starts with your assessment.

Leveling Up the Team: Because a Bottleneck Isn't a Badge of Honor

• Hold a scheduled, protected mentorship hour every day. Coaching is part of the job, not the thing you do if time is left over, because time is never left over.
• Keep a simple skills plan for each Tier 1 and Tier 2 tech, and deliver at least one internal training session a month.
• Coach with questions before answers. The goal is that the tech solves the next one without you.
• Measure your own success partly by how rarely the team needs to escalate to you. We are hiring a force multiplier, not a human ticket funnel.

Documentation & Automation: Turning Genius Into Infrastructure

• Build and maintain SOPs and the knowledge base in clear, no-nonsense language a tech can actually follow at 11pm on a Tuesday.
• Own the health of our tool stack, and ship automation and practical AI improvements that give the team hours back.
• Pitch before you build: the problem, the hours it costs us, the fix, the expected savings, the risks.
• On projects, you architect and hand off to a Tier 2 to implement, then stay close enough to help and run the post-mortem. Designing it and building it are different jobs.

You Have (The Non-Negotiables)

• A genuine drive to help people and zero ego about it. The most senior tech in the building who makes juniors feel small is worse than useless here.
• Strong communication, verbal and written, with the patience to match. With clients, the grandma test rules: if she would not get it, you are not done explaining.
• Seven or more years of hands-on IT experience, including real escalation-level or senior work. MSP experience strongly preferred, because supporting many environments is a different sport than supporting one.
• Deep Microsoft stack mastery: Microsoft 365 (Entra ID, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Intune, Conditional Access), Windows Server (AD, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP), networking, firewalls, and virtualization.
• Real backup and disaster recovery chops, including the part where you verify the restore actually works.
• Security fundamentals you can teach, not just configure.
• The judgment to know when a clever solution is the wrong solution.

Strongly Preferred (A.K.A. You'll Fit Right In)

• Scripting and automation in your bones (PowerShell or similar). If you have ever written a script purely to avoid doing something twice, you are our people.
• Genuine curiosity about practical AI in IT operations. We are actively building this out, and you would be driving a lot of it.
• Experience designing and scoping solutions in a sales or pre-sales capacity.
• ConnectWise Manage (our PSA) and QuoteWerks (our quoting tool). Bonus points if you have lived in them daily.

Would Also Be Great If You Have

• Apple and macOS experience. Some of our clients run Mac-heavy shops, so depth is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
• Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks: CIS Controls, CMMC, and friends.
• Senior certifications: AZ-104, MS-102, Network+, or comparable. We care more about what you can do than what is framed on the wall, but we will happily celebrate the wall too.
• The ability to type 50+ wpm without hunting for the keys.
• A love for technology, Star Wars, science, and gadgets. Strong opinions welcome. Defending them at lunch is practically in the job description.

What You Get

Starting pay depends on experience, certifications, and overall technical ability.

• Targeted annual earnings of $80,000 to $110,000, including your quarterly performance bonus. That is what you are on track to actually earn in a year, not a base figure with fine print hiding underneath it.
• A performance bonus that rewards strong work, with the specifics walked through once you are on the team.
• The most interesting technical work in the building, with a team that will know your name by lunch on day one.

We Have (Because We Actually Care)

• Paid vacation, PTO, and holiday pay. Unused vacation can be rolled over or sold back to the company.
• Great health insurance with a portion paid by INC, plus options for supplemental insurance and other payroll deduction plans.
• Matching retirement contributions. We match 4% of what you invest.
• Annual profit sharing. When the company wins, you win. This is not a maybe someday perk, it is a real chunk of change that shows up every year based on how we do as a team.
• Quarterly performance bonuses, paid four times a year and already reflected in the targeted earnings above.
• Family First Approach. Your family is the priority. When they need you, work waits.
• Casual, fun work atmosphere: ping pong table, dart board, comfortable break room, and a standing recommendation to keep a Nerf gun handy (you will know why eventually).
• Snacks, food, ice cream, and plenty of coffee and tea options. The fridge gets restocked monthly.

Where You Go From Here

Let us be straight with you, because you have earned straight: this is the top of our technical ladder. Tier 1 grows into Tier 2, and Tier 2 grows into this. There is no Tier 4 waiting in the wings with a bigger title and a worse parking spot.

So where do you go from the top? Deeper and wider. You become the person who shapes what INC deploys next, who leads our research into new technology, and who clients ask for by name when the stakes are high. As we grow, this role grows with us, into more technical leadership, more influence over what we build, and the kind of trusted-advisor work that only comes from being the person who is reliably right about the hard calls. We would much rather build the next decade of INC around people like you than watch you take that talent somewhere else.

One Last Thing

If this sounds like you, tell us about the hardest technical problem you have ever solved, and how you would teach the fix to a brand new Tier 1. Skip the cover-letter formalities. Just talk to us like a person, because that is exactly how we will talk to you.

In business since 2004, INC Systems is a technology services and consulting company that has been involved in a vast number of diverse projects. Until 2013, there were two divisions of the company, one focused on I.T. services and the other on low-voltage wiring, audio video projects, and home automation. A tremendous amount of knowledge was gained during our first decade, not only on the technical work but in managing client expectations and delivering value. Today we only work with businesses and non-profits that view I.T. as critical to their success.

INC Systems is an equal opportunity employer. We make all employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status.