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.