Senior Manager, Customer Service Operations

Bastion

$120K — $150K *
Business Services
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in customer support operations or a related field
  • Proven track record of building and managing support teams
  • Strong understanding of compliance regulations, particularly in payments and digital assets
  • Experience handling disputes and complaints in a support context
  • Ability to work in a high-volume, fast-paced environment
  • Excellent problem-solving and decision-making skills
  • Strong analytical skills to assess support volume and staffing needs

Responsibilities

  • Engage directly with customer support tickets from day one
  • Conduct thorough audits of existing support documentation and processes
  • Collaborate with internal teams to understand upcoming support tech stack
  • Develop an effective staffing strategy based on real ticket data
  • Oversee support quality and adherence to SLAs
  • Build and maintain a dynamic knowledge base for support processes
  • Train and manage the support team or partnership as it grows

Benefits

  • Remote work flexibility across the US
  • Opportunity to lead and shape customer support operations
  • Hands-on involvement at all levels of support processes
  • Collaboration with product and engineering teams
  • Fast-paced startup environment offering rapid growth opportunities
Full Job Description
Overview

We're looking for a Senior Manager, Customer Support Operations to build and run customer support for Bastion's enterprise partnerships. Our partners include some of the largest consumer technology and financial services companies in the world. A meaningful share of the support volume this role owns is tied to compliance-driven flows, which requires precision and a real understanding of what's being asked by the end user, not just a fast reply.

This is a hands-on role from day one, and it stays that way even as you scale. Volume and complexity are real from the start. You'll be the person actually working tickets at the beginning, refining the knowledge base and escalation paths, and you'll also need to figure out quickly whether the answer is an internal hire, a BPO partner, or both. Getting the org right, fast, is as much the job as the casework itself. You will have budget ownership.

You'll report to our Head of Product, embedded to ensure the voice of the customer is heard while we build and improve our products. You will partner closely with the internal team already mapping our support framework and implementing our support stack. That team can stand up the tooling; what we need from you is someone who can run the operation once it exists - triaging real cases, spotting where the process breaks, and having enough pattern recognition from prior roles to solve problems without a playbook already written for you.

You have likely built a customer support or risk/compliance support team in the past, and it will helpful if you have worked on disputes and complaints.

While we have a preference for the role to be based in NYC, we are open to candidates working remotely throughout the US.

Work to Be Done

Instead of a list of requirements, we want to give you a directional look into the first 30, 90, and 180 days on the job.

We are a startup, so the pace is fast and the specific work will change. People who thrive here are finding ways to contribute in their first week, and fully productive in their third month. You need to be okay with that.

If you think this is something you can handle, we will be excited to speak with you.
First 30 days: Get into the tickets and start scoping how this scales
  • Get hands-on with the support queue immediately - start resolving real cases, including compliance-driven flows, rather than shadowing for weeks before touching anything
  • Learn the product and the underlying compliance requirements deeply enough to diagnose issues without escalating every ambiguous case
  • Audit what exists: current documentation, ticket taxonomy, resolution paths, where cases get stuck, and where volume is coming from
  • Partner with the internal team building the support tech stack to understand what tooling is coming online and how it will change your workflow
  • Start forming a real point of view on how this function needs to scale - internal hires, a BPO partner, or both - based on the volume and complexity you're seeing firsthand
  • Outcomes
    • You are personally resolving a meaningful share of support volume, unaided
    • A clear, written map of issue types, current resolution paths, and where the process breaks down today
    • An initial recommendation on how to staff the function, grounded in real ticket data
By 90 days: Own the function end-to-end - and have started scaling it
  • Be the primary owner of support outcomes - SLAs, resolution quality, and escalation judgment all run through you
  • Build and maintain the knowledge base and case-handling documentation so it holds up under real volume, not just as a reference doc
  • Establish the operating rhythm: how volume gets tracked, how patterns get surfaced, how you decide what needs to go back to product or compliance
  • Move on the staffing call you scoped in month one - you should be actively hiring your first team member, evaluating BPO partners, or both, depending on what the volume actually demands
  • Outcomes
    • Support runs reliably against SLAs with you as the operational backbone
    • A living knowledge base that reflects real cases and real edge cases, not hypothetical ones
    • Concrete progress against your staffing plan - an offer out, a BPO partner onboarding, or both
By 180 days: Run the team or partnership you built - and stay in the work
  • Whether you've hired directly, onboarded a BPO partner, or both, you're running that operation now - training, quality standards, and escalation protocols all trace back to you
  • Stay hands-on yourself so the standards you've built don't dilute the moment someone else is doing the work
  • Build the playbook for onboarding this function into Bastion's next major partnership, based on patterns from what you've already run
  • Close the loop with product and engineering - a structured way for what you're seeing in tickets to actually change what gets built
  • Outcomes
    • A functioning team or partner relationship where you're still doing real casework alongside them
    • A repeatable onboarding playbook for extending support to new partnerships
Some challenges you might tackle
  • Doing the work before you get to design the system: You'll be resolving tickets yourself in week one, at real volume. The frameworks and documentation you build will come from having actually done the work, not from theorizing about it in advance
  • Compliance-driven flows with real consequences: A meaningful portion of support volume touches regulatory requirements specific to payments and digital assets. You don't need to be a compliance expert on day one, but you'll need to learn fast and know exactly when to loop in the right people
  • Scaling fast without guessing: Volume is real from the start, and you won't have the luxury of a slow build-up to a staffing decision. You'll need to make a credible call on internal hires vs. a BPO partner within your first couple of months, based on the ticket data you generate yourself
  • Building documentation that works for humans and AI: The knowledge base and case taxonomy you create will be used by you, any teammates or BPO agents you bring on, and AI-powered tooling the internal team is implementing. It has to hold up for all three
  • Staying in the work as you scale: Many people at this level default to stepping back once they have a report or a vendor. This role expects the opposite - you stay close to the actual tickets even as you build out the org around you

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