Customer Support & Operations Team Lead

About the role

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.

What you'll do

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.

What we're looking for

Required

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.

Nice to have

Experience with Intercom or Fin (Zendesk, Help Scout, Ada, Forethought, Gorgias and similar tools all transfer).

Billing-heavy support experience: subscriptions, plan changes, refunds, payment failures.

Experience overseeing operational data workflows like spreadsheet imports or QA on contractor-supported processes.

Background supporting nonprofit, SMB, or prosumer SaaS customers. You know how to read between the lines with non-technical users.

Remote startup experience.