Head of Support

Tern has 11,000 travel advisors on the platform today. We'll have 20,000 by year end. The support team is the foundation that determines whether they will succeed on the platform. Most support orgs at this scale are still reacting. More tickets, more headcount, repeat. We're not doing this. AI is embedded into almost every single workflow as a force multiplier for our human team. We need someone to wire it all together. That's this role.

ABOUT TERN

Tern is a venture-backed software company on a mission to reshape the $127B travel agency industry by giving power back to the entrepreneurs who built it.

Nearly 98% of travel agencies are small businesses. These businesses have been chronically underserved by technology. We're here to change that. Our platform helps travel advisors run more efficient, professional, and profitable operations, giving them the modern infrastructure they need to lead the next chapter of travel.

But the impact goes beyond business. Travel advisors help clients move more intentionally through the world. When a traveler works with an advisor, they're more likely to avoid overtouristed hotspots and more likely to spend their dollars in places where they can do real good. That's the kind of travel we want more of.

At Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both.

HEAD OF SUPPORT

Most software companies treat support as a cost center and education as a nice-to-have. Tern treats both as the thing that determines whether an advisor builds a thriving travel business or churns before they see the product's value.

The host agencies coming online in 2026 push our travel advisors on the platform to 20,000+ by year-end. Support owns the education layer for all of them, from day one through long-term feature adoption, regardless of where someone is in their implementation or whether they have a dedicated success lead. This role serves the masses. Every advisor, at every stage of their journey with Tern.

As the Head of Support, you'll own all of it: the support operation, the education strategy, and the team that executes both. That's around 8 direct reports across the US and Philippines teams, plus the TCE program. You'll collaborate with the implementation team on what resources agencies need during transition and create content that supports that process, but when any user needs help at scale, support is the answer. You'll set the activation metric, build the system that moves it, and report on what's working. And you're genuinely capable and excited to flex across IC and manager work and show the team what good looks like, whether that means jumping into the queue on a busy day, running a training with an agency end to end, or sitting down for a 1:1 with a direct report.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the support operation end to end. Set the standard for what AI handles vs. what escalates to a human, keep FRT under 30 minutes, and hold CSAT at 95%+ across both AI and human-resolved tickets.

• Build a content production system that keeps pace with Tern's weekly R&D shipping cycle. Training content aligned to new capabilities, not just beginner features, scenario-based, async-first, and available before advisors have to ask.

• Own the Tern & Learn curriculum. Audit what exists, restructure it into a sequenced learning path, and tie every milestone to advisor activation metrics- key feature adoption at 30, 60, and 90 days on platform.

• Partner with R&D to embed enablement directly in the product. Work with the advisor AI squad to prioritize in-product onboarding flows that meet advisors where they are, for the persona they are, and deliver the right answer at the right time.

• Collaborate with the implementation team on agency transitions. Create the resources agencies need to onboard their teams, then own those advisors at scale once they're live.

• Lead a team of around 8 support and education specialists across the US and Philippines. Run the weekly cadence, set team standards, coach individuals, and build the playbook they execute every day.

• Instrument and own the metrics: FRT, CSAT, AI resolution rate, advisor feature adoption at 30/60/90 days, and actual resolved issues where the advisor didn't abandon their need.

WHAT YOU HAVE

• You've been in the queue and managed the queue. Whether you started in support and moved into management, or came up through training and had to learn operations along the way, you know both sides and can operate on both when it matters.

• Experience building scalable education programs at a B2B SaaS company that sells to SMB or mid, market businesses. You've done this before and have data to show what changed because of it.

• Experience optimizing a help center and support operation to drive advisor behavior change, not just answer volume. You measure success by feature adoption and retention, not just deflection rates.

• A track record of building measurement into education programs from day one- you know what activation looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days and you build toward it.

• People management experience with distributed teams. You can run a 1:1, give hard feedback, develop junior ICs, and hold the team to a standard even when stretched.

• Operational instincts. You set metrics, build dashboards, and use data to decide where to focus.

• You're genuinely comfortable as both a coach and an individual contributor. You can run a training for an agency, jump into a support queue during a busy stretch, and manage a team- sometimes in the same week, without losing your footing in any of it.

BONUS POINTS

• You've worked through a support scaling inflection where volume grew faster than headcount could and you built smarter systems to keep up.

• You've partnered with a product or engineering team to get enablement workflows prioritized and shipped inside the product itself.

• You've built training content for solo operators or small business owners running their own businesses, not internal teams or enterprise IT buyers.

• You've designed a live training program (office hours, webinars, cohort sessions) that worked alongside async content rather than substituting for it.

WHAT WE VALUE @ TERN

🌱 We're always leveling up. Whether you're deepening your craft, learning from a teammate, or embracing a new challenge, growth is core to our identity.

🧭 We act with optimistic agency. We take initiative, seek clarity, and move forward, even when the path isn't obvious. Through every peak and valley, we lead with curiosity, laughter, kindness, and resolve.

💪 We expect operational excellence. We ship value to our users every single week. We believe that compounding habits lead to sustainable productivity, consistency, and mutual trust.

Operating Principles:

👂 We deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in.

➕ We embrace the power of and, and not now. We challenge trade-offs by asking better questions. We break hard problems into small pieces and tackle them with intention. We also know to make the hard call to say "not right now".

📣 We speak up and move forward. Everyone at Tern has a voice and a responsibility to use it. We invite healthy tension, share dissenting views early, and challenge each other with curiosity, not ego.

🏃 We move fast and sweat the details. Velocity matters and relentless progress beats perfection every time. But speed isn't chaos: we stay aligned, own our outcomes, and care deeply about quality.

🤣 We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. We hire kind, driven people who elevate the room. If you've got a big ego or take yourself too seriously, you won't last.

WHY THIS ROLE IS EXCITING

You've built learning management systems, been in the queue, and scaled the queue. Now you have the chance to take what you know works from a traditional standpoint and supercharge it with AI. Automate what can be automated, meet advisors where they already are, and deploy a human team in the places that actually move the needle. The mission is clear: activate advisors to be self-sufficient at scale. The tools are here. What's missing is the person who knows how to put them together.

WHY JOIN TERN?

• Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space

• Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team

• Influence and shape our user success strategy from the ground up

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package

Tern is committed to building a team that represents people from many different backgrounds and life experiences, reflecting our worldview coinciding with the users and customers we serve across the world. We prefer that you apply, so think of our postings as the start of the conversation. Take the chance, you may be a wonderful add to our Tern team, even if you don't fully match every requirement on the job description.