About the Role
Title: Director, Customer Support Engineering
Director, Customer Support Engineering
Location: Remote – United States
Job Description:
About Vercel:
Vercel’s Frontend Cloud provides the developer experience and infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. Customers like Under Armour, eBay, The Washington Post, Johnson & Johnson, and Zapier use Vercel to build dynamic user experiences on the web.
At Vercel, our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products and that goes hand in hand with creating an environment where you can do the best work of your life.
About the Role:
We are seeking to hire an experienced Director for our Customer Support Engineering (CSE) teams in America who has a strong focus on both velocity and quality and a desire to deliver a customer experience beyond all expectations. This role inherits two existing teams with a variety of experience levels and the opportunity to build out further to ensure an adequate level of coverage for our customers. You will join an existing management team and find a set of well documented processes, policies, and expectations, although there is considerable scope and expectation to re-evaluate and simplify these, in the name of continually improving outcomes for customers alongside our efficiency.
You will be driven by working with and expanding your teams with exceptional people who care deeply about providing the best customer experience and this will be reflected in your approach to hiring – world class talent that understands the right balance between digging deep and moving fast. You will focus on scaling and efficiency, identifying and implementing solutions that reduce the need for customers to contact support while building partnerships across the company that allow your teams to get the help they need and finding the balance between human and technical solutions. You will understand the importance of growing a support department in such a way that it can continually improve the customer experience while not scaling linearly with incoming cases – ambitious and bold ideas are strongly encouraged.
This role is fast paced and while regular office hours will suffice most of the time, you must be prepared for flexibility during busier times or when unexpected issues arise in order to support our global, 24×7 support operations. You will have ample support from leadership at all times, alongside other CSE managers in alternate timezones. Ultimately, the desire to deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale is what will motivate you and help you and your team achieve success through a variety of means that you will have direct influence over.
What You Will Do:
- Assuming responsibility for all support delivered within the Americas region.
- Devising and executing both regional and department level strategy.
- Defining requirements for department training that deliver continuous improvement.
- Ensuring the delivery of an exceptional customer experience at scale.
- Setting the appropriate SLOs for your teams to ensure department goals are met.
- Working with the Product organization to provide feedback and implement solutions.
- Engaging stakeholders at all levels of the business to drive cross-functional improvements.
- Handling executive escalations that arrive ad-hoc through various channels.
- Identifying and implementing tooling to improve the efficiency and quality of work completed.
- Driving a culture of engineering solutions to prevent repetitive actions being taken.
- Recruiting exceptional people that understand and are driven greatly by Vercel’s mission.
- Recognizing trends, issue patterns, and proactively taking action to prevent further impact.
- Leading by example with your attitude, urgency, and ability to execute at all times.
About You
- Experience balancing the velocity of work with the quality of customer outcomes.
- Experience operating as a technical leader who resolves concerns for developers.
- Experience working within a globally distributed, technical support department.
- Experience setting and managing targets and growth plans for multiple teams.
- Experience driving efficiencies and building teams that don’t scale linearly with case volume.
- Experience analyzing large scale datasets to identify areas of success and difficulty.
- Desire to work cross-functionally, engaging closely with Product as primary stakeholders.
- Desire to mentor direct reports and help them succeed in their growth.
- Desire to empower your teams, helping them to prioritize, and identifying bottlenecks.
- Desire to innovate, take risks, and level up the support provided to an exceptional standard.
- Confident dealing with a fast-paced platform with regular changes.
- Confident in being assertive to ensure the right outcomes are achieved for customers.
- Confident taking ownership of important decisions as a member of the leadership team.
- Confident making decisions that scale well over the long-term.
- Ability to identify upstream concerns, represent the customer impact, and drive change.
- Ability to work autonomously with a reliance on asynchronous communication.
- Ability to calmly handle pressurized situations at all times.
- Technical knowledge within modern application development and deployment.
- 5+ years experience in a highly technical support leadership role.
Bonus If You:
- Are experienced in frontend development using React and Next.js.
- Are experienced with AI solutions for support teams.
- Have had exposure to working with Salesforce to deliver support.
- Have worked with a CDN on a regular basis.
- Understand, and can communicate, matters regarding DNS.
- Have created a custom CI/CD pipeline or CLI tool.
- Have experience working with Enterprise applications at global scale.