Director, Support Engineering

As Director of Support Engineering, you'll own the function responsible for resolving customer issues across Avoca's production systems, and you'll shape it into a scalable, high-performing operation as we grow. This is a leadership role with a high technical bar. You'll build and manage the Support Engineering team, define how we triage, escalate, and resolve issues, and stay close enough to the technical work to unblock the hardest problems yourself. You'll develop product expertise on par with a senior deployment engineer so you can set the standard for quality, speed, and rigor across the team. You'll also serve as the critical bridge between Support and Product Engineering, ensuring the right problems reach the right teams with full context, while your team resolves everything else independently and efficiently.

What You’ll Do:

• Hire, develop, and retain support engineers as we scale.

• Set the bar for technical depth, ownership, and customer communication across the team.

• Define career paths, performance standards, and coaching rhythms that drive continuous improvement.

• Serve as the senior escalation point for complex, high-impact, or long-running issues.

• Personally debug production issues involving configuration, workflows, system behavior, and data flow when needed.

• Step in decisively when tickets stall: re-scope the problem, reset expectations with the customer, or drive to resolution.

• Design and refine the operating model: triage workflows, escalation paths, staffing plans, and SLAs.

• Manage workload distribution and capacity as ticket volume and product complexity grow.

• Instrument the function with metrics that give leadership clear visibility into support health and customer impact.

• Own and maintain the team's knowledge base, ensure troubleshooting guides, configuration references, and resolution playbooks are accurate, current, and actively used by the team.

• Own the interface between Support and Engineering and ensure escalations are well-scoped, reproducible, and actionable.

• Identify patterns in mishandled or low-confidence AI responses and partner with the AI team to improve response accuracy, escalation triggers, and conversation handling logic.

• Influence product and engineering priorities based on patterns in support data.

• Continuously sharpen escalation criteria so Engineering time is spent on the right problems.

What You’ll Bring:

• 8-12+ years in technical support, solutions engineering, or engineering-adjacent roles, with 3+ years leading teams.

• Track record of building or scaling a technical support function in a high-growth B2B SaaS environment.

• Strong engineering debugging instincts: you can reason through complex production issues and teach others to do the same.

• Deep familiarity with configuration-driven systems, integrations, and workflow logic.

• Proven ability to hire well, coach directly, and hold a high bar without micromanaging.

• Process-builder by nature: you design systems that scale, not just solve the problem in front of you.

• Comfortable operating cross-functionally with CS, Product, and Engineering leadership.

Who You Are:

• A builder and operator at heart. You’re energized by standing up new functions, systematizing what works, and iterating relentlessly.

• A strategic leader who thrives in high-growth, high-ambiguity environments and is motivated by outsized impact.

• A thoughtful communicator who distills complexity into clarity for technical and non-technical audiences alike.

• Deeply collaborative, with a natural instinct for forging alignment across teams.