Senior Support Engineering Manager

About the Role

Our Build Team develops and supports the products and tools that empower our industry and law enforcement partners to combat child sexual abuse online. Our Support Engineering Team provides technical expertise to ensure a top-tier experience for our growing customer base. As the Senior Support Engineering Manager, you’ll play a vital role in ensuring products like Safer and Thorn Detect deliver meaningful impact by leading a team that drives exceptional onboarding, provides deep technical guidance, and delivers continuous support to create a top-tier experience for our growing and diverse user base.

What You’ll Do

• Lead a high-performing, collaborative, and inclusive team of support engineers who ensure exceptional customer onboarding, technical support, and sustained product adoption across Thorn’s customer base.
• Partner closely with customers to guide them through the full sales and product lifecycle, providing expert technical guidance, resolving complex issues, and identifying opportunities to improve long-term adoption and satisfaction.
• Serve as an expert on customer use cases, helping identify optimal configurations and creative solutions to complex customer use cases during the pre-sales and post-sales process with internal and external stakeholders. 
• Drive continuous improvement and automation of support processes to scale efficiently with a growing customer base, building team expertise and sustainable systems along the way.
• Collaborate cross-functionally across Product team, Engineering, Data Science, and Sales to align support priorities, streamline handoffs, and ensure cohesive, high-quality customer experiences.
• Own and continuously improve your team’s operating processes (format, cadence, decision-making forums) to meet evolving team and customer needs.
• Proactively share your technical expertise on customer use cases with cross-functional stakeholders, including clearly communicating their needs in the product development cycle, balancing their expectations for release timelines, and creatively and collaboratively brainstorming new ways to deliver value.
• Work with engineers across projects to identify and action opportunities for alignment and workflow improvement, share learnings, and advocate for best practices in our teams and our products.
• Manage your direct reports through consistent 1-1s, quarterly check-ins, and regular feedback to support their individual needs, help them meet their sprint objectives & business goals, and proactively protect their wellness.
• Invest in your direct reports’ personal development, working with them to clarify their areas of interest, define opportunities for learning, and support their growth.
• Support the career development of support engineers with varied technical ambitions by helping define growth paths, identifying stretch opportunities, and creating exposure to adjacent engineering work where appropriate.
• Define and lead the hiring process for your team, with diversity top of mind, to find the right people as efficiently as possible. You identify opportunities to improve, and ensure that many points of view are involved in the process.

What We’re Looking For

• You have a commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do.
• You communicate clearly, efficiently, and thoughtfully, to technical and non-technical audiences. We’re a highly-distributed team, so written communication is crucial, from Slack to technical documentation to Zoom calls.
• You have experience communicating with external users, with a love for providing an exceptional experience for the customer.
• You have a focus on using tech to automate and scale teams, allowing them to handle more without scaling people.
• You are comfortable with a fast-paced and fluid environment, and adapt to meet the shifting needs of a team.
• You enjoy creative problem solving for people as well as technical issues, optimizing processes, and helping teams find the best ways to work together to get things done.
• You demonstrate strong judgement in prioritizing customer needs, technical constraints, and team capacity in a fast-moving environment.
• You care for people, and want to support your team members to grow and succeed, finding creative pathways for growth and learning alongside day-to-day responsibilities.
• You are experienced in coaching technical talent with diverse career goals and helping them translate long-term technical ambitions into actionable development plans.
• You collaborate across different disciplines, including internal and external stakeholders, finding creative solutions while meeting the needs of the support team and customers.
• You have empathy and can be a strong advocate for our users while balancing the vision and constraints of technical realities.

Technologies We Use

• Jira Service Manager (JSM) / Github / Docusaurus
• Docker / Kubernetes / Terraform
• AWS / Google Cloud
• Amazon SQS / Google PubSub / RabbitMQ / Kafka
• Node / Python 3 / TypeScript
• PostgreSQL / Elasticsearch

Compensation and Benefits

A reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role is $100,000-$138,000/year. This range takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to location; skill sets; experience and training; licensure, and certifications.

Our remote-first work model is structured around working from home most of the time. But, there will be times that employees are expected to travel. For example, Thorn may host company-wide gatherings, and smaller teams may hold in-person meetings and team-building events, or require attendance at specific conferences.

At Thorn, we know that great people make a great organization. We value our people and offer employees a broad range of benefits. Learn more about what working at Thorn can mean for you.