Vercel

Director, Customer Support Engineering

Vercel

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States • California

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Salary

💰 $188,000 - $282,000 per year

Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

CloudDNSJavaScriptNext.jsOpen SourceReact

About the role

  • Lead Vercel’s Customer Support Engineering teams across the Americas, owning outcomes for a 24/7, developer-first customer base.
  • Run regional operations, protect SLOs, and partner deeply with Product and Engineering to turn frontline signals into preventive fixes.
  • Scale with AI—building agents, automations, and knowledge systems that reduce inbound, accelerate resolution, and raise CSAT.
  • Hire exceptional talent, coach managers and ICs, and run an AI-assisted training program that compresses time-to-excellence.
  • Lead calmly through high-severity events, own executive comms, and drive durable resolutions with actionable RCAs.
  • Operate by the numbers, instrumenting quality, speed, and effort metrics to guide resourcing and roadmaps.
  • Own platform support outcomes for the Americas, ensuring 24/7 global continuity and handoffs that protect customer experience and SLAs.
  • Develop and execute a regional operating plan that ladders into the global Support strategy; translate strategy into measurable programs, roadmaps, and results.
  • Define and continuously evolve a mastery-based training program, including AI-assisted curricula, to raise the SME bar and reduce time-to-excellence across the team.
  • Deliver an exceptional customer experience at scale by instrumenting quality, speed, and effort metrics—and acting on insights in near real-time.
  • Set, monitor, and refine team SLOs and error budgets that align to department goals; use data to drive prioritization, staffing, and process changes.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering to convert frontline signals into roadmap inputs and preventive fixes; close the loop with clear impact metrics.
  • Align and influence cross-functional stakeholders (Sales, Success, Marketing, Trust & Safety) to remove friction and streamline customer journeys.
  • Lead executive escalations with calm urgency—owning comms, assembling the right experts fast, and driving to durable resolution with clear RCAs.
  • Select, implement, and operationalize tooling (including AI agents, knowledge systems, and observability) that measurably improve efficiency and quality.
  • Build an engineering-first support culture: automate repeatable work, codify runbooks, and ship self-healing workflows that reduce ticket volume.
  • Hire, develop, and retain exceptional people who embody Vercel's mission and thrive in an AI-augmented, outcomes-driven environment.
  • Detect trends early through telemetry and case analysis; launch mitigation plans and preventive changes before issues scale.
  • Set the tone for urgency, ownership, and execution excellence; coach managers and ICs to operate with clarity, speed, and high standards.
  • Work transparently—share progress, learnings, and experiments—iterate in the open to achieve world-class outcomes for customers and the team.

Requirements

  • You've led AI-augmented support operations and shipped automations/agents that improved CSAT, speed, and cost-to-serve, with clear before/after metrics.
  • You balance speed and quality using data—defining quality bars, measuring effort/accuracy, and making trade-offs explicit to protect customer outcomes.
  • You operate as a technical leader for developers: you dig into logs, repros, and RCAs; translate between frontend teams and platform/infra; and drive preventive fixes.
  • You've scaled globally distributed support teams, mastering follow-the-sun, handoffs, and incident readiness while maintaining a consistent customer experience.
  • You set and manage goals for multiple teams (SLOs, error budgets, quality targets), and you use these to inform staffing, strategy, and prioritization.
  • You engineer leverage: you automate repetitive work, codify runbooks, and design systems that decouple team growth from case volume.
  • You're fluent with data at scale—building dashboards, running cohort and funnel analyses, and turning telemetry into roadmaps and quality improvements.
  • You partner deeply with Product and Engineering—bringing frontline signals, quantifying impact, and closing the loop from issue to roadmap to measurable change.
  • You build leaders: you coach managers and ICs, set clear growth plans, and create a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
  • You empower teams to prioritize well—clarifying strategy, removing bottlenecks, and aligning work to the highest customer and business impact.
  • You're decisive and calm under pressure—owning executive escalations, making timely calls with imperfect data, and communicating crisply.
  • You thrive in async-first, global environments; you write clearly, default to transparency, and keep momentum without constant meetings.
  • You have deep knowledge of modern app development and cloud deployment (Next.js, React, Vercel, edge/serverless, CI/CD, observability, networking).
  • You bring 7–10 years leading highly technical support organizations in cloud/platform or developer tooling, including multi-team leadership.
  • Bonus: Have shipped production apps with React and Next.js (App Router, RSC, Edge, ISR), and can translate developer pain into support playbooks and product signals.
  • Bonus: Have operated or debugged CDNs/edge networks (cache keys, TTLs, surrogate control, POP routing, TLS, HTTP/3, QUIC), and can turn patterns into self-healing runbooks.
  • Bonus: Are fluent in DNS and infra primitives (authoritative vs. recursive, CNAME/ALIAS/ANAME, DNSSEC, propagation, BGP/Anycast), and can explain trade-offs clearly to customers and execs.
  • Bonus: Have built or scaled CI/CD pipelines or CLIs (GitHub Actions, Turborepo, monorepo strategies, canary/blue-green, artifact caching) that improved lead time and change failure rate.
  • Bonus: Have supported Enterprise-grade, global applications with strict compliance and uptime needs—owning incident readiness, SLAs, and exec communications.
  • Bonus: Have led incident management at scale (SEV runbooks, on-call rotations, PIRs with actionable RCAs, chaos drills) and reduced repeat incidents.
  • Bonus: Have built internal platforms or developer productivity tooling (DX focus), and can quantify impact on developer throughput and reliability.
  • Bonus: Have contributed to open source in the JS/React/Next.js ecosystem or written technical content that educates developers at scale.
  • Bonus: Have migrated complex workloads to edge/serverless architectures and can articulate cost, latency, and reliability trade-offs.