We’re building something ambitious at Fly.io: a new public cloud, running on our own hardware all over the world, built to make it easy to run apps close to users everywhere.
We have an amazing Support Team, comprised of lots of developers all over the world (just like our customers) - they’re all engineers who happen to be good at talking to customers (rather than support reps with a bit of technical knowledge). We’re looking for a Director of Customer Support to help us level up our Support Team and make our customers even happier!
This role is very senior — you’ll be autonomously setting strategy and vision for a key team at Fly.io! But Fly.io is a startup (you know, many hats and all), so you’ll also be involved in day-to-day management work, taking your strategy and making it a reality by figuring out how to get your teammates started tackling the big problems, as well as coaching and giving feedback to help your teammates grow. You’ll probably even get your hands dirty from time to time answering a few support tickets!
What you’ll do:
- Promote the voice and value of the customer throughout Fly.io. Gather, analyze, and share customer experience insights and recommendations to make Fly.io better. This goes beyond reporting back to our engineering teams; our Support engineers find ways to improve our products directly!
- Clarify the voice and brand of Fly.io support, and infuse that into all customer interactions. The Support team is part of the greater group of folks that build the overall customer experience, alongside engineering teams and the marketing team. The Support team should help shape each point of contact we have with our customers.
- Design and execute a Support strategy that actively contributes to Fly.io’s overall success. Expect to have a blend of birds-eye-view strategic/planning work and hands-on day-to-day work to make that vision a reality.
- Define team and individual success and track performance, using metrics to assess impact and effectiveness. Adjust the team’s approach as we learn what works and what doesn’t for Fly.io and our customers.
- Oversee the implementation of tools, systems, and processes that improve Support quality, efficiency and effectiveness. Expect that you’ll be rolling up your sleeves to make some of these changes happen yourself, not just relying on others to do the legwork!
- Build and lead a team of Support Engineers, ensuring excellent day-to-day operations and a great Support team experience.
This role will be a good fit for you if:
- You’re experienced in leading and scaling support teams that communicate with customers over email and support forums
- You’ve got stellar written communication skills (we’re a distributed, async company!)
- You’ve got a take on what best practices are for support teams, and are eager to blend those best practices with Fly.io’s unique way of getting work done, and Fly.io’s quirky customer-facing voice
- You’re capable of doing very technical support yourself — you don’t need to be an engineer, but you need to understand their problems, and know how to debug and troubleshoot
- You’ve got strong management skills: you’re good at having tough conversations, and skilled at delivering feedback to help folks on your team grow
You’ll know you’re succeeding in your job if:
- Customers are happy after a Support interaction
- Fly.io’s Support Team is aligned around a strong vision, and is successfully delivering on that vision (support engineers are leading projects to represent the customer’s voice throughout Fly.io, continuously improving our response times and quality, etc.)
- Customer insights are regularly being used to inform Fly’s product development
- Support engineers are consistently demonstrating empathy for the customer, in all their interactions (internally and externally)
- You’ve collaborated with other leaders to build a strong focus on the customer across the company
- Engineers from other teams proactively look to the Support Team for insight when they’re stuck on a question about user-facing value
- Folks across the company (on Support, and on other teams) consistently frame prioritization of their work in terms of user value
This is a senior, fully-remote, full-time position.
In order to optimize for pay equity, Fly.io doesn’t negotiate salaries. We have standardized salaries for each employee level. The salary for this role is $225k USD. We offer competitive equity grants with a long exercise window. US employees get health care, everyone gets flexible vacation time (with a minimum), hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff.
Our hiring process may be a little different from what you’re used to. We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent. So instead of purely resumes and interviews, we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it, with “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet. (We’re happy to talk, though!)
If you’re interested, mail jobs+supportdirector@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please tell us your Github username, and also include a paragraph or two explaining how the best tech support organization you have experience with got from zero to excellent support.