Customer Support Manager

Ambassador Labs (formerly Datawire), the cloud native developer experience leader, enables developers to code, ship, and run applications faster and easier than ever. Maker of top Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source projects, including Emissary-ingress and Telepresence, Ambassador Labs delivers a developer control plane for Kubernetes that integrates the development, deployment, and production infrastructure for developers and organizations worldwide including Microsoft, PTC, NVidia, and Ticketmaster. Ambassador Labs is backed by top investors including Insight Partners, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Four Rivers Group.

We are looking to hire a customer support manager that cares as much about users as we do and has embraced the cloud native phenomenon that is taking over the world. We strongly believe that Ambassador Labs’ success is dependent on hiring a diverse team. Diversity means a broader spectrum of opinions, ways of working and approaches to solving... problems; we feel it is critical to helping drive the creativity, innovation and sound decision-making our customers love us for!

About the Job

You'll be leading a rapidly growing team of highly technical support engineers as they help users embrace the future of software development in a cloud native world. You'll work with product, engineering, sales, and developer relations to support software that sits at the intersection between technology and the real world.

We see technology as a means to solving problems and getting things done and, thus, we prioritize a growth mindset over existing skill sets. Our managers are leaders who not only coach and support their team but also hold them accountable to the high standards that our customers deserve. Our culture values making good tradeoffs, working as a team, and leaving your ego at the door.

Our technical support team is focused firmly helping users make the shift to the cloud with Kubernetes, front and center.

Here’s a bit more insight into what life will be like as a customer support manager at Ambassador Labs:

• You’ll guide our technical support engineers as they help ensure users are successful with our products.
• You’ll provide your team with coaching, mentorship, and support: holding regular one on ones, giving context on priorities, collaborating with other teams, unblocking obstacles, and resolving any conflicts that arise.
• You’ll hold your support engineers accountable to increasingly higher standards, pushing them to continuously improve and enabling them as needed to achieve success both individually and as part of a team. You’ll be constantly figuring out ways to enable your team to solve user pains more simply and quickly.
• You’ll partner closely with recruitment to hire future team members with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• You and your team will use GitHub issues and Zendesk tickets to track work, our products to reproduce and identify solutions to user problems, and of course Slack and Zoom. We have a weekly all-company (Zoom) meeting to stay current on all the things, but otherwise we try hard to minimize the number of scheduled meetings in order to maximize focus time.

Note that on-call manager responsibility is shared among all managers in the engineering organization, currently once every five weeks.

About You

You have hands-on experience with user onboarding and training, knowledge base development, and facilitation of lightning fast and effective technical support.

You have experience both managing and developing technical support teams to pursue excellence over time. We’re looking for someone who constantly looks for ways to hold their team to higher standards, both individually and collectively. What drives you is leading teams to support products in a way that WOWs your users. Empathizing with our users is crucial in guiding the right set of support practices at Ambassador Labs.

Being a manager is a big job that also demands balancing multiple projects in a constantly evolving environment. You have a passion for helping prioritize and organize project work alongside engineering and product.

You have a proven track record of successfully leading technical support teams. Ideally, you’ve already had some direct or indirect exposure to Kubernetes. You care about and work towards inspiring support engineers to be GREAT.

Ambassador Labs is a remote-friendly company with “pods” in Boston, Portland and Montreal. Our pods are a way of bridging the gap between being 100% remote and working in an office. Eventually, when it is safe to do so, we will have physical offices in each of these locations for team members to go to on a part-time basis to fuel their creativity through brainstorming and watercooler conversations. This is our way of creating the best of both worlds. For now, everyone is 100% remote.

How to Apply

We are looking forward to hearing from you. We move quickly and decisively. We don’t need to talk to 20 other candidates to make a decision, so if the fit feels right on both sides, you can be part of the team as soon as next week! The first step is speaking to our People Person, followed by the engineering leadership, and then one or two of your future colleagues. Interviews are typically 30 - 45 minutes, all remote. We’ll talk through your background and experience, your approach to work, and how you’ll make a difference as a member of our team: we want to hear about your real-life experiences and successes, especially users that you’ve made happy.

This is a demanding application process and a significant career move that’s well worth considering. We appreciate you giving us that consideration, and we promise to give you our full attention in return. Talk to you soon