About the role

Support Engineering investigates the issues that require deeper technical understanding than frontline Support can provide. The team uses customer context, application behavior, logs, databases, integrations, APIs, and code-level context to determine whether an issue can be resolved through configuration, data correction, documentation, enablement, or an in-app change-or whether it is a product defect that Engineering needs to fix. Your role is to make that path clear and scalable: establish shared expectations across teams, ensure escalations are well validated and actionable, and help the organization learn from recurring patterns rather than treating each issue as an isolated event.

You'll lead the strategic evolution of the function through strong partnership with Support Engineering managers, frontline Support, Product, and Engineering. You'll shape routing, triage, escalation, and feedback mechanisms; build reporting that makes technical friction visible; and guide investments in diagnostics, tooling, documentation, and enablement. You'll also help leaders make better tradeoffs between immediate customer resolution and durable product or process improvements.

As Director, you'll directly manage the Support Engineering Manager and hold them accountable for team performance, technical quality, people development, and progress against the function's priorities. You'll set the vision for how Support Engineering grows with Ashby's product surface area and customer complexity, while building the leadership structure, career paths, and operating model needed to scale over time.

What you'll own

• Set the vision and operating model for Support Engineering, aligning the function's priorities with Ashby's broader Customer Success goals.
• Directly lead, coach, and develop the Support Engineering Manager through clear expectations, regular feedback, career support, and accountability for team health, technical quality, and customer outcomes.
• Build shared operating standards across frontline Support, Support Engineering, Product, and Engineering for triage, investigation, documentation, escalation quality, ownership, and handoffs, while clarifying how technical issues move from Support intake through investigation to Engineering or Product partnership.
• Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to synthesize recurring technical customer patterns, improve supportability and operability, and influence prioritization of product, platform, tooling, and process improvements.
• Establish the data and review mechanisms needed to understand escalation health, recurring friction, resolution speed, frontline self-sufficiency, customer effort, and the function's influence on product priorities and supportability. Use these signals to guide improvements and develop the team over time.
• Evolve the organization's structure, hiring plan, onboarding, career paths, and regional model as Support Engineering scales.
• Build trust across leadership by making tradeoffs visible, communicating technical and customer impact clearly, and helping teams move forward when ownership or priorities are ambiguous.

You should apply if

• You have led a Support Engineering, Technical Support, Developer Support, Production Support, or similarly technical function in a B2B SaaS or complex software environment.
• You have led through managers or built a leadership layer, and know how to create clarity, accountability, and growth without becoming a bottleneck for decisions.
• You have enough technical depth to reason about APIs, integrations, logs, databases, application behavior, architecture, and debugging approaches-and to earn the trust of experienced engineers.
• You have shaped the boundary between frontline Support, Support Engineering, Product, and Engineering, including escalation criteria, triage practices, ownership, and feedback loops.
• You have used data and recurring patterns to drive improvements in supportability, product quality, tooling, process, or Engineering prioritization.
• You are energized by systems-level problems and can turn operational friction into a focused strategy, a useful first version, and measurable improvement.
• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences, especially when explaining tradeoffs, uncertainty, customer impact, and recommended action to senior stakeholders. You communicate with concision and can compress a complex tradeoff into a few clear sentences for senior stakeholders.
• You are a hands-on, customer-centric leader who can move between strategy, organizational design, technical details, and the day-to-day realities of supporting customers.
• You think about scalable support systems through automation, self-serve, and AI-enhanced tooling applied with good judgment.

You should not apply if

• You're looking primarily for a people-management or queue-oversight role and do not want to shape technical workflows, escalation quality, or cross-functional operating models.
• Most of your experience is in internal IT, infrastructure, cloud operations, or systems administration without substantial experience with customer-impacting SaaS applications, technical support, or product supportability.
• You prefer to operate within established systems rather than design new structures as a function and product organization grows.
• You see Support Engineering primarily as a pass-through queue to Engineering rather than an investigation, enablement, and leverage layer that should help resolve more issues independently.
• You're uncomfortable influencing Engineering or Product priorities, challenging assumptions respectfully, or navigating tradeoffs between a quick resolution and a more scalable solution.
• You prefer prolonged analysis or perfect certainty over making a well-reasoned decision, learning quickly, and improving the system in motion.

Interview process

Our interview process is thorough and designed to give you enough information to assess whether Ashby is the right fit for you, while helping us evaluate technical leadership, people management, communication, judgment, and cross-functional collaboration.

• Intro call with Recruiting - 30 min
• Hiring Manager interview - 45 min
• Take-home assessment - 5 days to complete
• Support Leadership - 30 min
• Founder interview - 30 min
• Virtual Onsite - 75 min
  
  • Engineering Partnership - 30 min
  • Support Eng Team - 30 min
  • Closing Questions - 15 min

Benefits

Benefits vary by country and are shared in more detail during the process. International employees receive statutory benefits and, where available, employer-paid supplemental health coverage.

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn't feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby-do it when you feel financially comfortable.
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect "Vacation?" in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.
• A $1,200 annual learning and professional-development budget.
• A one-time $2,000 home-office setup budget for furniture, monitors, peripherals, and ergonomic equipment, plus a company-provided laptop.
• Extended health benefits for you and your dependents (subject to availability with our Employer of Record)
• Opportunities to spend time with teammates through an annual company offsite, team offsites, local meetups, and virtual events.