Senior Manager, Support Engineering

About the position

Afresh is looking for a Senior Manager of Customer Support Engineering to bring humble, proactive, and thoughtful leadership to our growing Technical Customer Support team. You will lead a group of support engineers on our Tier 2 team and directly manage and oversee our Tier 1 operations. Our Tier 2 team is responsible for tracking trends in tickets, identifying the scope of trickier problems, getting as close as possible to the root cause, and sometimes even fixing it, to help provide incredible technical support to our customers. You'll aid with prioritization, planning, technical investigation, and critical communications around these high priority and/or high complexity issues that arise with the Afresh solutions. You'll provide mentorship to your direct reports, building strong relationships, supporting personal and professional growth, and fostering community in our team. You'll also help to build and improve our processes with an eye to sharing insights with our product org to fix recurring issues, communicating the scope and root cause of issues, scaling the team, aiding with our hiring, onboarding, training efforts, and driving our mission to reduce food waste.

Responsibilities

• Manage Tier 1 and 2 technical support engineers, providing mentorship and leadership.
• Oversee our Tier 1 support team and ensure quality interactions with customers.
• Conduct regular 1:1s and team syncs to understand internal and cross-functional pain points.
• Help prioritize the Tier 1 & 2 workload with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Manage relationships with relevant 3rd parties including Boldr.
• Own and coordinate strategic initiatives in support of company-wide OKRs.
• Maintain a 6-12 month vision recapped in MBRs for visibility to the Leadership team.
• Understand Afresh's customers' needs and advocate for fixes and improvements.
• Ensure prioritized initiatives are executed with weekly updates.
• Build strong cross-functional relationships with global outsourced Tier 1 team and in-house teams.
• Hire, onboard, and train new Tier 1 and 2 Support Engineering team members.
• Own headcount and non-headcount budgeting process for the Support org.
• Be on point for P1 and P2 customer incidents and coordinate resolution.
• Aid with prioritization, planning, technical investigation, and critical communications.
• Identify and translate technical issues into customer action and communication plans.
• Participate in post-mortems and collaborate cross-functionally.
• Own schedules and escalation policies for the customer org.
• Become the subject matter expert on all Support tools and processes.
• Lead the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
• Help build and improve debugging, triaging, escalation, and resolution protocols.
• Identify tooling, dashboards, and documentation to speed up resolution time.
• Track and report on team KPIs with a solutions-oriented mindset.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in support engineering, customer support or similar roles.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical support teams.
• Strong strategic and methodical problem-solving skills.
• Data-driven analytical approach to customer and team advocacy.
• Empathetic leadership, mentorship, and coaching skills.
• Exceptional foresight and proactivity.
• Calm demeanor and effective communication in high-stakes interactions.
• Clear and concise writing and communication skills.
• Experience working with databases and SQL.
• Project management skills, ideally with scrum or agile experience.
• Organized and self-motivated individual, comfortable making decisions within ambiguity.
• Experience with Zendesk, Zapier, Instabug or other CS solutions.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in grocery and/or B2B SaaS.