Director, Customer Support Engineering

Job description

About Vercel:

Vercel gives developers the tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. As the team behind v0, Next.js, and AI SDK, Vercel helps customers like Ramp, Supreme, PayPal, and Under Armour build for the AI-native web.

Our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products. That starts with creating a place where everyone can do their best work. Whether you’re building on our platform, supporting our customers, or shaping our story: You can just ship things.

About the Role:

You’ll lead Vercel’s Customer Support Engineering teams across the Americas, owning outcomes for a ²⁴⁄₇, developer-first customer base. Your mandate is to lift velocity and quality together and design an AI-native support experience that feels magical to customers and measurably better for the business. You’ll inherit two solid teams with clear processes and the autonomy to simplify, modernize, and scale what works alongside a global management team.

You’ll run regional operations, protect SLOs, and partner deeply with Product and Engineering to turn frontline signals into preventive fixes. You’ll scale with AI—building agents, automations, and knowledge systems that reduce inbound, accelerate resolution, and raise CSAT—while fostering an engineering-first culture with robust runbooks and self-healing workflows. You’ll hire exceptional talent, coach managers and ICs, and run an AI-assisted training program that compresses time-to-excellence. You’ll lead calmly through high-severity events, own executive comms, and drive durable resolutions with actionable RCAs. You’ll operate by the numbers, instrumenting quality, speed, and effort metrics to guide resourcing and roadmaps.

This role matters because our customers build the web’s most critical experiences with Next.js and Vercel. In 6–12 months, success looks like AI agents reliably handling triage and common resolutions; faster, more consistent TTR; higher deflection and self-serve; fewer repeat incidents with stronger follow-the-sun handoffs; and simpler processes and tooling with measurable efficiency gains. You’ll work primarily async, flexing during incidents as part of our ²⁴⁄₇ operation. If you want to build the future of Support—AI-native, developer-first, and relentlessly outcome-focused—this is your canvas.

What You Will Do:

• 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.

About You:

• 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 If You:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Have supported Enterprise-grade, global applications with strict compliance and uptime needs—owning incident readiness, SLAs, and exec communications.
• Have led incident management at scale (SEV runbooks, on-call rotations, PIRs with actionable RCAs, chaos drills) and reduced repeat incidents.
• Have built internal platforms or developer productivity tooling (DX focus), and can quantify impact on developer throughput and reliability.
• Have contributed to open source in the JS/React/Next.js ecosystem or written technical content that educates developers at scale.
• Have migrated complex workloads to edge/serverless architectures and can articulate cost, latency, and reliability trade-offs.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $188,000-282,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location, and the total package includes benefits and equity-based compensation. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don’t necessarily check every box on the job description.