Head of Support Engineering

Description

The company raised a $250M Series C led by a16z, with Benchmark, Lightspeed and YC also investing, bringing its valuation to $2.2 billion.

It builds a search engine for AI. Its Search API is used by agents, Fortune 500 companies and AI labs.

The team is about 100 people, mostly based in San Francisco, with backgrounds that include Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, startup founding and leaving school early.

This role builds and leads the Support function, which runs AI-first and around the clock for all committed customers worldwide.

AI tools such as Pylon and AI agents handle first-line requests. Your Support Engineers take the hard technical cases the AI cannot, with the same depth as the Forward Deployed Engineers.

You also oversee escalations, watching account health mostly through AI and making sure every contraction or churn risk gets to the right people with a plan.

This is a technical leadership role. You need the same technical bar as your team, including debugging an integration, reading code and opening a pull request.

Responsibilities

• Recruit, onboard and manage Support Engineers across regions to cover the clock with follow-the-sun shifts.
• Set up the support system in Pylon: tickets, SLA tracking, severity levels, automations and end-of-shift handoffs, aiming for maximum efficiency.
• Decide which tickets the AI resolves and which go to a person, and raise the share the AI handles alone.
• Send escalations to Engineering with full context, and keep Support responsible for customer follow-up until the issue is closed.
• Monitor account health across regions. Flag each contraction or churn risk to the account team and leadership with the actions needed and owners, and track it to resolution. Your Support Engineers carry this; add dedicated staff only if the volume requires it.
• Work with AEs, account managers and FDEs on at-risk and strategic accounts.
• Convert patterns in tickets into product feedback and push fixes with Product and Engineering.
• Report on support health: response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, AI resolution rate, and churn and contraction avoided.

Requirements

• Several years of hands-on programming, matching the level of the Support Engineers you hire: debugging APIs and customer integrations and opening pull requests yourself.
• 5+ years in technical support, support engineering, SRE or customer engineering, including 2+ years leading a technical support team, ideally at an API, developer tools or AI company.
• Experience creating a support operation from nothing: tooling, SLAs, severity models, escalation paths and 24/7 coverage.
• Sound judgment on automation and AI, with evidence you have used them to grow support without losing quality.
• Clear communication with customers, engineers and executives, including under pressure.
• You might excel if you have built or rebuilt a support function at a fast-growing technical company.
• You might excel if you have run Pylon or a similar support platform at scale.
• You might excel if you have built with LLMs, RAG or agents.
• You might excel if you care about organizing the world's knowledge and making it usable by machines.

Conditions

This role is in person in San Francisco.

Visa sponsorship is available for international candidates, for example STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1 and E3.

Benefits

• Premium healthcare covering medical, dental and vision.
• Fertility benefits.
• Monthly wellness stipend.