Director, Customer Support Engineering

About Vercel:

Vercel gives developers the tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. As the team behind v0, Next.js, and AI SDK, Vercel helps customers like Ramp, Supreme, PayPal, and Under Armour build for the AI-native web.

Our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products. That starts with creating a place where everyone can do their best work. Whether you're building on our platform, supporting our customers, or shaping our story: You can just ship things.

About the Role:

You’ll lead Vercel’s Customer Support Engineering teams across the Americas, owning outcomes for a 24/7, developer-first customer base. Your mandate is to lift velocity and quality together and design an AI-native support experience that feels magical to customers and measurably better for the business. You’ll inherit two solid teams with clear processes and the autonomy to simplify, modernize, and scale what works alongside a global management team.

You’ll run regional operations, protect SLOs, and partner deeply with Product and Engineering to turn frontline signals into preventive fixes. You’ll scale with AI—building agents, automations, and knowledge systems that reduce inbound, accelerate resolution, and raise CSAT—while fostering an engineering-first culture with robust runbooks and self-healing workflows. You’ll hire exceptional talent, coach managers and ICs, and run an AI-assisted training program that compresses time-to-excellence. You’ll lead calmly through high-severity events, own executive comms, and drive durable resolutions with actionable RCAs. You’ll operate by the numbers, instrumenting quality, speed, and effort metrics to guide resourcing and roadmaps.

This role matters because our customers build the web’s most critical experiences with Next.js and Vercel. In 6–12 months, success looks like AI agents reliably handling triage and common resolutions; faster, more consistent TTR; higher deflection and self-serve; fewer repeat incidents with stronger follow-the-sun handoffs; and simpler processes and tooling with measurable efficiency gains. You’ll work primarily async, flexing during incidents as part of our 24/7 operation. If you want to build the future of Support—AI-native, developer-first, and relentlessly outcome-focused—this is your canvas.

What You Will Do:

• Own platform support outcomes for the Americas, ensuring 24/7 global continuity and handoffs that protect customer experience and SLAs.
• Develop and execute a regional operating plan that ladders into the global Support strategy; translate strategy into measurable programs, roadmaps, and results.
• Define and continuously evolve a mastery-based training program, including AI-assisted curricula, to raise the SME bar and reduce time-to-excellence across the team.
• Deliver an exceptional customer experience at scale by instrumenting quality, speed, and effort metrics—and acting on insights in near real-time.
• Set, monitor, and refine team SLOs and error budgets that align to department goals; use data to drive prioritization, staffing, and process changes.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to convert frontline signals into roadmap inputs and preventive fixes; close the loop with clear impact metrics.
• Align and influence cross-functional stakeholders (Sales, Success, Marketing, Trust & Safety) to remove friction and streamline customer journeys.
• Lead executive escalations with calm urgency—owning comms, assembling the right experts fast, and driving to durable resolution with clear RCAs.
• Select, implement, and operationalize tooling (including AI agents, knowledge systems, and observability) that measurably improve efficiency and quality.
• Build an engineering-first support culture: automate repeatable work, codify runbooks, and ship self-healing workflows that reduce ticket volume.
• Hire, develop, and retain exceptional people who embody Vercel's mission and thrive in an AI-augmented, outcomes-driven environment.
• Detect trends early through telemetry and case analysis; launch mitigation plans and preventive changes before issues scale.
• Set the tone for urgency, ownership, and execution excellence; coach managers and ICs to operate with clarity, speed, and high standards.
• Work transparently—share progress, learnings, and experiments—iterate in the open to achieve world-class outcomes for customers and the team.

About You:

• You've led AI-augmented support operations and shipped automations/agents that improved CSAT, speed, and cost-to-serve, with clear before/after metrics.
• You balance speed and quality using data—defining quality bars, measuring effort/accuracy, and making trade-offs explic