Nonprofits do some of the most important work in the world, and most of them are still managing grants in spreadsheets. We’re fixing that.
Instrumentlis a profitable, hypergrowth, YC-backed SaaS platform building the operating system for grant-funded organizations. More than 5,500 nonprofits use Instrumentl to discover, track, and win grant funding, from local community organizations to the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. Collectively they’ve moved over $1 billion through our platform.
We’re doubling year over year, customers love us (NPS 65+, Ellis PMF 60+), and we’re hiring people who want to build something that matters.
About the role:
We’re hiring a Customer Support & Operations Team Lead , reporting to our VP of Customer Success, to own the systems and workflows behind a fast, accurate, and genuinely delightful support experience for the nonprofits and grant writers who run on Instrumentl.
This is a hands-on player-coach role. You’ll handle tickets, billing questions, bug reports, escalations, and help-center updates yourself, while raising the bar for the team that handles them alongside you. You’ll guide one full-time support IC and a small bench of contractors, sharpen our AI support workflows in Fin, and decide where automation, self-serve, and human judgment each belong.
We’re past 5,500 customers and growing fast. Until now, support has run on one person plus contractors. You get to define what comes next: how we use AI, how we staff, what “world-class” looks like, and how we build a function that scales without scaling headcount linearly. As volume grows, this role is built to grow with it, from Team Lead into a Manager seat owning the broader support org.
You’ll partner with Customer Success, Finance, Product, Engineering, and our Support Engineer to make sure customer issues get understood, escalated cleanly, and resolved systematically.
What you'll do:
Handle customer tickets, escalations, billing questions, bug reports, and product education. You’re in the queue, not above it.
Set the standards for response quality, tone, accuracy, and escalation, then hold the team (humans and AI) to them.
Improve first-response and resolution times for our highest-priority ticket types while maintaining or improving CSAT.
Build lightweight QA loops so quality is something we measure, not something we hope for.
Own day-to-day Fin/AI support performance: training, monitoring, reviewing answers, and tightening workflows.
Spot repetitive ticket categories that should be solved by AI, macros, better help-center content, or product education, and ship the fix.
Build human-in-the-loop workflows so AI resolves more, and routes the rest to a human cleanly.
Use customer conversations as a feedback loop: surface documentation gaps, AI gaps, UX issues, and product confusion.
Own queue management, routing, escalation paths, SLAs, and coverage planning, including the awkward stuff like company off-sites and holidays.
Sharpen billing, cancellation, and refund workflows in partnership with Finance and CS.
Oversee operational data workflows, including our spreadsheet-import process and the contractors who power it.
Create internal playbooks and documentation so support doesn’t live in tribal knowledge.
Build reporting that helps leadership see ticket volume, customer pain, team performance, and scaling risk.
Partner with our Support Engineer on bug triage, reproduction steps, prioritization, and customer follow-up.
Distinguish real product bugs from user confusion, billing edge cases, and education gaps, and escalate accordingly.
Surface recurring customer pain points and translate them into clear recommendations for Product, Engineering, Finance, and CS.
Close the loop with customers when issues need investigation or follow-up.
Manage one full-time support IC plus contractors and VAs. Set role clarity, goals, and performance expectations.
Coach the team on judgment, quality, efficiency, and customer empathy.
Improve onboarding and training so new contributors ramp faster.
Help decide when support volume justifies an additional FTE, and what the next version of the team looks like.
What we're looking for:
4+ years in customer support, support operations, or CX, ideally in SaaS, including time owning quality, not just answering tickets.
Prior people management experience. You’ve set expectations, given hard feedback, and coached someone into a better version of their work.
AI-native instincts. You already use AI in your day-to-day, have opinions about where it helps and where it hurts, and can own Fin/AI quality without being walked through it.
A track record of building or improving support systems (routing, escalation, QA, reporting, or self-serve). You’ve gone beyond managing a queue.
Excellent customer judgment and writing. You can translate billing chaos or a confusing bug into something a non-technical customer actually understands.
Player-coach energy. You’re happy to jump into the queue, update an article, review an AI answer, or debug a customer issue yourself.
Comfort with ambiguity. You can operate in a Slack-first, fast-moving environment where the process you need sometimes doesn’t exist yet.
Experience with Intercom or Fin (Zendesk, Help Scout, Ada, Forethought, Gorgias and similar tools all transfer).
Billing-heavy support experience: subscriptions, plan changes, refunds, payment failures.
Experience overseeing operational data workflows like spreadsheet imports or QA on contractor-supported processes.
Background supporting nonprofit, SMB, or prosumer SaaS customers. You know how to read between the lines with non-technical users.
Remote startup experience.
Compensation & Benefits
For US-based candidates, the target salary range is $95,000 – $115,000 USD base plus equity. Final compensation is determined based on experience, skillset, scope, interview performance, and geographic location.
Benefits
100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance for employees; 50% for dependents
Generous PTO, including parental leave
401(k)
Company laptop and a stipend to set up your home workstation
The chance to work with awesome nonprofits across the US doing meaningful work
Instrumentl is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building an inclusive workplace and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please let us know.
Instrumentl is a hypergrowth YC-backed startup with over 4,000 nonprofit clients, from local homeless shelters to larger organizations like the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. We are building the future of fundraising automation, helping nonprofits to discover, track, and manage grants efficiently through our SaaS platform.
Our charts are dramatically up-and-to-the-right 📈 — we’re cash flow positive and doubling year-over-year, with customers who love us. Join us on this rocket ship to Mars!
At Instrumentl:
We’re customer-focused. We routinely seek feedback from our customers to improve the Instrumentl experience for everyone. Our first company value is "The customer is the hero" and we mean it.
We love to experiment. We are constantly generating new concepts and iterating to see what works - ideation and experimentation are essential here. "Bend the curve" is another key company value.
We appreciate authenticity. We have a diverse range of life experiences, and we encourage open, clear communication with each other about the things that matter most to us.
We’re approachable and collaborative. Everyone has a voice, and we’re all building Instrumentl together.
We kick it every day with some of the nicest people in the world. No joke, our customers are often on the front lines educating kids, saving endangered species, and restoring watersheds. In helping them take advantage of Instrumentl’s technology, you’re helping them move the world forward.
Salary
$95,000 - $115,000
Location
Remote
Experience
5+ years
Total raised
$55.0M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.