Senior Lead, Support

In the Shopify ecosystem, support is a growth engine. Merchants choose apps by their reviews, and reviews are earned one great support conversation at a time. The person in this role owns that engine.

We’re hiring a Sr Lead, Support to lead our Merchant Support and Technical Support teams, the escalated teams behind launches, setups, and technical troubleshooting. This is a player/coach/builder role. You’ll coach and develop the team, own the metrics that tell us whether support is working, and build the scalable systems that let a small team deliver 5-star support at growing volume: supporting Fin, and building our conversational quality-assurance system on Fin’s AI tooling. You’ll also stay in the work, because merchant conversations are a daily part of this job.

We evaluate every candidate for this role against three things. If reading them makes you lean in rather than back, keep going.

1 · Autonomy: owns the ambiguity

This role comes with real ownership. The foundational pieces of our support and escalated-support motions are yours to build.

• You own coaching, reporting, forecasting, and performance management for both teams, along with the decisions that come with them.
• You own our app store rating and review velocity as first-class metrics, and you run the support experience that underpins our net retention targets. Support is the front line under that number.
• You know when coaching is working and when it isn’t, and you make the transition to performance management deliberately rather than late.
• When something is broken, whether a queue, a workflow, or a knowledge gap, you fix it or build the fix, then tell us what you did.

2 · Craft: elite at the execution step, with taste

Shipped improvements that move a metric matter more here than ideas about support. We want to see a track record.

• You can point to metrics you moved, such as app store ratings, review velocity, CSAT, resolution times, or retention, and explain exactly what you did to move them.
• You’ve built or rebuilt a support function’s foundations before: QA, coaching cadences, escalation paths, tooling.
• You’ve managed performance honestly, including the hard conversations, and your former reports would still vouch for you.
• Taste is part of the bar. Strong execution at Jira produces a very different support conversation than strong execution at Apple or Linear. Ours reads friendly, concise, and helpful, with no walls of text and nothing robotic.

3 · Leverage: multiplies with AI

At Smile we’re strong advocates for using AI to help speed up iteration, increase productivity, and save our human brainpower for the really challenging problems. The best support leaders also have range. They’ve worked in or alongside success, product, ops, or RevOps, and they pull those muscles into support daily. One week the job needs an analyst, the next a coach, the next a systems builder, the next a person calmly running an escalation call with a top merchant.

• You translate support signal into product insight, retention risk into a success play, and ticket data into a forecast finance can trust.
• You’ve built things yourself: AI-assisted triage, QA rubrics, workflows, reporting pipelines.
• You bring high taste and deep craft to support systems. You know what world-class looks like, and you build toward it in ways that scale without adding headcount linearly.
• Adjacent teams seek you out because you speak their language, and merchants can’t tell where support ends and the rest of the company begins.

• The team: leadership of Merchant Support and Technical Support, including coaching, development, performance management, and hiring as we grow.
• The numbers: reporting and forecasting for the support org. App store rating and review velocity are yours, as is support’s contribution to net retention.
• The top merchants: the escalated moments with our largest accounts, including launches, setups, technical troubleshooting, and running the escalation meetings yourself.
• The inbox: regularly and by design. Staying close to merchants is how you’ll know what to build.
• The systems: our conversational quality-assurance system, built on Fin’s AI tooling and complementary to the teammate who owns Fin itself. This role consumes Fin’s signal, coaches from it, and feeds knowledge gaps back.

• You know Shopify, its ecosystem, its support norms, and its merchants, deeply enough to earn credibility in week one.
• You’ve been a player/coach before and loved it. IC work keeps you sharp rather than holding you back.
• You have strong opinions about what great support looks like, formed by doing the work, and you’re excited to encode them into systems.
• You’re energized by owning quality, review, and revenue-driving metrics.

• Want real ownership rather than a playbook handed to you.
• See AI as the biggest leverage opportunity the support craft has ever had.
• Would rather ship the workflow than write the strategy doc about it.
• Like working with people who care about the merchant more than the ticket.
  
  

This probably isn’t the right fit if you’re looking for a pure people-management role where the team handles the merchant conversations.