Customer Support & Operations Team Lead

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About the Opportunity

Nonprofits perform some of the most crucial work globally, yet many still rely on spreadsheets for grant management. The company is dedicated to transforming this landscape.

This is a profitable, hypergrowth, YC-backed SaaS platform building the operating system for grant-funded organizations. Over 5,500 nonprofits utilize the platform to discover, track, and secure grant funding, serving entities from local community organizations to large institutions. Collectively, these organizations have processed over $1 billion through the platform.

The organization is experiencing year-over-year growth, boasts high customer satisfaction (NPS 65+, Ellis PMF 60+), and is seeking individuals passionate about building impactful solutions.

About the role:

The company is hiring a Customer Support & Operations Team Lead, reporting to the VP of Customer Success. This role will be responsible for the systems and workflows that ensure a fast, accurate, and exceptionally positive support experience for the nonprofits and grant writers using the platform.

This is a hands-on player-coach position. The individual will directly handle tickets, billing inquiries, bug reports, escalations, and help-center updates, while simultaneously elevating the standards for the team supporting these functions. The role involves guiding one full-time support individual contributor and a small group of contractors, refining AI support workflows, and determining the optimal balance between automation, self-service, and human judgment.

With over 5,500 customers and rapid expansion, support has historically been managed by a single individual and contractors. This role offers the opportunity to define the future of support operations, including AI utilization, staffing strategies, defining "world-class" service, and building a function that scales efficiently. As volume increases, this role is designed to evolve into a Manager position overseeing the broader support organization.

Collaboration will be key, partnering with Customer Success, Finance, Product, Engineering, and the Support Engineer to ensure customer issues are understood, escalated effectively, and resolved systematically.

Key Responsibilities

Own the customer experience

• Handle customer tickets, escalations, billing questions, bug reports, and product education. Active participation in the support queue is expected.
• Establish and enforce standards for response quality, tone, accuracy, and escalation for both human and AI support.
• Improve first-response and resolution times for high-priority ticket types while maintaining or enhancing customer satisfaction.
• Implement lightweight quality assurance processes to ensure consistent service delivery.

Scale support through AI and self-serve

• Manage day-to-day AI support performance, including training, monitoring, reviewing responses, and refining workflows.
• Identify repetitive ticket categories that can be addressed through AI, macros, improved help-center content, or enhanced product education, and implement solutions.
• Develop human-in-the-loop workflows to increase AI resolution rates and ensure seamless routing of complex issues to human agents.
• Utilize customer interactions as a feedback mechanism to identify documentation gaps, AI limitations, user experience issues, and areas of product confusion.

Build the support operating system

• Oversee queue management, routing, escalation paths, service level agreements (SLAs), and coverage planning, including for special circumstances like company events and holidays.
• Refine billing, cancellation, and refund workflows in collaboration with Finance and Customer Success.
• Supervise operational data workflows, including the process for importing spreadsheets and the contractors involved.
• Create internal playbooks and documentation to centralize support knowledge and reduce reliance on tribal knowledge.
• Develop reporting to provide leadership with insights into ticket volume, customer pain points, team performance, and scaling risks.

Strengthen feedback loops with the rest of the company

• Partner with the Support Engineer on bug triage, reproduction steps, prioritization, and customer follow-up.
• Differentiate between genuine product bugs, user confusion, billing edge cases, and educational gaps, escalating appropriately.
• Surface recurring customer pain points and translate them into clear, actionable recommendations for Product, Engineering, Finance, and Customer Success.
• Ensure customers are informed when issues require investigation or follow-up.

Develop the team

• Manage one full-time support individual contributor and contractors/virtual assistants. Define role clarity, set goals, and establish performance expectations.
• Coach the team on judgment, quality, efficiency, and customer empathy.
• Enhance onboarding and training programs to accelerate the ramp-up time for new contributors.
• Contribute to decisions regarding when additional full-time support staff are warranted and the future structure of the team.

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in customer support, support operations, or customer experience, preferably within a SaaS environment, including experience owning quality assurance beyond ticket resolution.
• Prior people management experience, including setting expectations, providing constructive feedback, and coaching individuals to improve performance.
• Strong AI-native instincts; demonstrated use of AI in daily work, informed opinions on its application, and the ability to manage AI quality independently.
• Proven track record of building or improving support systems such as routing, escalation, QA, reporting, or self-serve solutions.
• Excellent customer judgment and writing skills, with the ability to clearly communicate complex issues like billing problems or bugs to non-technical customers.
• Player-coach mentality, willing to actively participate in the support queue, update documentation, review AI responses, or troubleshoot customer issues.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, Slack-first environment where processes may need to be developed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Intercom or Fin (transferable experience with Zendesk, Help Scout, Ada, Forethought, Gorgias, and similar tools is valuable).
• Experience with billing-heavy support, including subscriptions, plan changes, refunds, and payment failures.
• Experience overseeing operational data workflows, such as spreadsheet imports or quality assurance for contractor-supported processes.
• Background supporting nonprofit, small to medium-sized business (SMB), or prosumer SaaS customers, with an understanding of how to interpret needs from non-technical users.
• Experience in a remote startup environment.

Compensation & Benefits

For candidates based in the US, the target salary range is $95,000 – $115,000 USD base salary, plus equity. Final compensation will be determined based on experience, skillset, scope of the role, interview performance, and geographic location.

Benefits

• 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance for employees; 50% coverage for dependents.
• Generous paid time off, including parental leave.
• 401(k) plan.
• Company laptop and a stipend for home office setup.
• The opportunity to work with impactful nonprofits across the US.

The organization is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace. It does not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Candidates from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply. If a reasonable accommodation is needed during the application or interview process, please inform the company.