Customer Support & Operations Team Lead

Hello, we’re Instrumentl.

Nonprofits do some of the most important work in the world, and most of them are still managing grants in spreadsheets. We’re fixing that. More than 5,500 nonprofits use Instrumentl to discover, track, and win grant funding, from local community organizations to the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. Collectively they’ve moved over $1 billion through our platform. We’re doubling year over year, customers love us (NPS 65+, Ellis PMF 60+), and we’re hiring people who want to build something that matters.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 elevate accordingly.
• Surface recurring customer pain points and translate them into clear recommendations for Product, Engineering, Finance, and CS.
• Close the loop with customers when issues need investigation or follow‑up.

• Manage one full‑time support IC plus contractors and VAs. Set role clarity, goals, and performance expectations.
• Coach the team on judgment, quality, efficiency, and customer empathy.
• Improve onboarding and training so new contributors ramp faster.
• Help decide when support volume justifies an additional FTE, and what the next…