Customer Support & Operations Team Lead, Instrumentl

• 4+ years in customer support, support operations, or CX, ideally in SaaS, including time owning quality, not just answering tickets
• Prior people management experience. You’ve set expectations, given hard feedback, and coached someone into a better version of their work
• AI-native instincts. You already use AI in your day-to-day, have opinions about where it helps and where it hurts, and can own Fin/AI quality without being walked through it
• A track record of building or improving support systems (routing, escalation, QA, reporting, or self-serve). You’ve gone beyond managing a queue
• Excellent customer judgment and writing. You can translate billing chaos or a confusing bug into something a non-technical customer actually understands
• Player-coach energy. You’re happy to jump into the queue, update an article, review an AI answer, or debug a customer issue yourself
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can operate in a Slack-first, fast-moving environment where the process you need sometimes doesn’t exist yet

Desirable

• We’re hiring a Customer Support & Operations Team Lead, reporting to our VP of Customer Success, to own the systems and workflows behind a fast, accurate, and genuinely delightful support experience for the nonprofits and grant writers who run on Instrumentl
• This is a hands-on player-coach role
• You’ll handle tickets, billing questions, bug reports, escalations, and help-center updates yourself, while raising the bar for the team that handles them alongside you
• You’ll guide one full-time support IC and a small bench of contractors, sharpen our AI support workflows in Fin, and decide where automation, self-serve, and human judgment each belong
• We’re past 5,500 customers and growing fast. Until now, support has run on one person plus contractors
• You get to define what comes next: how we use AI, how we staff, what “world-class” looks like, and how we build a function that scales without scaling headcount linearly
• As volume grows, this role is built to grow with it, from Team Lead into a Manager seat owning the broader support org
• You’ll partner with Customer Success, Finance, Product, Engineering, and our Support Engineer to make sure customer issues get understood, escalated cleanly, and resolved systematically
• Own the customer experience:
• Handle customer tickets, escalations, billing questions, bug reports, and product education. You’re in the queue, not above it
• Set the standards for response quality, tone, accuracy, and escalation, then hold the team (humans and AI) to them
• Improve first-response and resolution times for our highest-priority ticket types while maintaining or improving CSAT
• Build lightweight QA loops so quality is something we measure, not something we hope for
• Scale support through AI and self-serve:
• Own day-to-day Fin/AI support performance: training, monitoring, reviewing answers, and tightening workflows
• Spot repetitive ticket categories that should be solved by AI, macros, better help-center content, or product education, and ship the fix
• Build human-in-the-loop workflows so AI resolves more, and routes the rest to a human cleanly
• Use customer conversations as a feedback loop: surface documentation gaps, AI gaps, UX issues, and product confusion
• Build the support operating system:
• Own queue management, routing, escalation paths, SLAs, and coverage planning, including the awkward stuff like company off-sites and holidays
• Sharpen billing, cancellation, and refund workflows in partnership with Finance and CS
• Oversee operational data workflows, including our spreadsheet-import process and the contractors who power it
• Create internal playbooks and documentation so support doesn’t live in tribal knowledge
• Build reporting that helps leadership see ticket volume, customer pain, team performance, and scaling risk
• Strengthen feedback loops with the rest of the company:
• Partner with our Support Engineer on bug triage, reproduction steps, prioritization, and customer follow-up
• Distinguish real product bugs from user confusion, billing edge cases, and education gaps, and escalate accordingly
• Surface recurring customer pain points and translate them into clear recommendations for Product, Engineering, Finance, and CS
• Close the loop with customers when issues need investigation or follow-up
• Develop the team:
• Manage one full-time support IC plus contractors and VAs. Set role clarity, goals, and performance expectations
• Coach the team on judgment, quality, efficiency, and customer empathy
• Improve onboarding and training so new contributors ramp faster
• Help decide when support volume justifies an additional FTE, and what the next version of the team looks like