Senior Manager, Support Engineering

Summary

Join Afresh, a company dedicated to eliminating food waste and improving fresh food access, as a Senior Manager of Customer Support Engineering. Lead and mentor a team of support engineers, overseeing both Tier 1 and Tier 2 operations. You will prioritize and plan technical investigations, communicate effectively with customers and stakeholders, and improve support processes. This role involves building strong cross-functional relationships, hiring and training team members, and managing budgets. Contribute to Afresh's mission by identifying and resolving technical issues, improving customer experience, and reducing food waste. The ideal candidate possesses strong leadership, problem-solving, and communication skills, along with experience in support engineering and team management.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in support engineering, customer support or similar roles and 5+ years of experience leading technical support teams
• Strong strategic and methodical problem-solving skills with exceptional execution and prioritization capabilities
• A data-driven analytical approach to customer and team advocacy
• Empathetic, sturdy leadership, mentorship, and coaching skills
• Exceptional foresight and proactivity; growth with an eye to scalability and sustainability
• Calm demeanor and an effective, thoughtful communicator in high-stakes customer interactions
• A clear and concise writer and communicator who can internalize both customers' and direct reports' feedback and effectively advocate for their needs within the context of the greater business
• Experience working with databases and SQL, both writing and understanding queries, and familiarity with data stores and databases
• Project management skills, ideally with scrum or agile experience, and the ability to operate with high autonomy and execution
• Organized and self-motivated individual, comfortable making decisions within ambiguity
• Experience with Zendesk, Zapier, Instabug or other CS solutions is required

Responsibilities

• Manage Tier 1 and 2 technical support engineers, providing mentorship and leadership, supporting personal and professional growth, unblocking them on tricky issues, and fostering community in our team
• Oversee our Tier 1 support team and ensure we are driving quality interactions with our customers and that they are unblocked in their day-to-day execution of handling support tickets
• Conduct regular 1:1s, and team syncs with your team, to understand pain points internally and cross-functionally, and provide thoughtful and proactive solutions by improving our processes
• Help prioritize the ever-changing, highly dynamic Tier 1 & 2 workload with a continuous improvement mindset so we can continue to deflect or streamline ticket resolution
• Manage our relationship with all relevant 3rd parties including Boldr
• Own and coordinate strategic initiatives in support of company-wide OKRs and priorities
• Maintain a 6-12 month vision recapped in MBRs for visibility and transparency to our Leadership team, including monthly newsletters to be distributed across the organization
• Deeply understand Afresh's customers' needs, how our different Partners' needs differ, and advocate for fixes and improvements that maximize the positive impact across customers
• Ensure prioritized initiatives are being executed with weekly updates and that sprint planning is being effectively managed
• Build strong cross-functional relationships with our amazing global outsourced Tier 1 team, and our in-house Product, Engineering, Operations, and Account Managers to partner on providing a high support quality experience for our customers
• Hire, onboard, and train new Tier 1 and 2 Support Engineering team members based on a comprehensive outlook on our ticketing forecast and strategic initiatives aimed at reducing resolution time
• Own our headcount and non-headcount budgeting process for the Support org
• Be on point for P1 and P2 customer incidents and coordinate resolution between our Tech and Customer organizations. This includes the ability to be on-call and available on nights and weekends
• Aid with prioritization, planning, technical investigation, and critical communications around high priority customer inquiries, escalations, and incidents that arise with the Afresh solutions, including defining and refining Tier 1 & 2 expectations during urgent incidents
• Be able to quickly identify and translate technical issues into customer action and communication plans in order to coordinate a positive experience for our customers
• Be an active participant on post-mortems and collaborate cross-functionally such that our processes evolve to become more effective
• Own the schedules and escalation policies for the customer org in incident.io
• Become the subject matter expert on all of our Support tools and processes, including mastering the understanding on how our Product works
• Lead the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback by using ticket data to identify recurring issues that, when fixed, reduce inbound tickets, improve both the customer experience and the product, thus driving our mission to reduce food waste
• Help to build and improve upon our debugging, triaging, escalation, and resolution protocol to make Support at Afresh effective, timely, and a delightful experience for our end users
• Help identify tooling, dashboards, and documentation that can be built by Tier 1s and 2s that will speed up resolution time, then project manage their development and launch
• Track and report on team KPIs with a solutions-oriented mindset, aiming always to improve team health and Support quality

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in grocery and/or B2B SaaS is a major bonus!

Benefits

Remote work, flexible hours