Senior Director, Customer Operations
Function: Customer Ops (also leading the Tech Architecture function)
Location: North America — Ottawa, Canada, Charlotte, NC OR Menlo Park, CA (hybrid 3 days/week)
California Salary Range: $200K - $220K + bonus
Role Summary
Skan AI is building out its target-state operating model for its DevSecOps function: one global team per function, staffed across North America and India on a follow-the-sun model. The Senior Director, Customer Operations owns the customer-facing half of that model end to end — from the moment a customer environment is deployed through every subsequent issue, complaint, and escalation.
This is a hands-on senior leadership role with two mandates. First, the Director owns Customer Ops: Tech Onboarding, Service Desk & Support (L1/L2/L3), and SRE — accountable for the health, reliability, and customer experience of every production tenant. Second, the Director is the lead for the Tech Architecture function, serving as the senior technical authority for solution design and integration readiness across strategic and growth accounts.
The Director is the North America anchor of the follow-the-sun coverage model — the leader who holds the fort during US hours — and partners daily with Selva (Delivery Engineering) so that the two desks operate as one global team with seamless warm handoffs, rather than two regional silos.
What You'll Own
End-to-end Customer Operations
- Accountable for the full customer operations lifecycle: from deployment of a customer environment through ongoing run, maintenance, issue resolution, complaints, and escalation management.
- Own production reliability outcomes for customer tenants — SLOs, incident response, error budgets, and rollback discipline — in close coordination with Delivery Engineering, who owns the deployment pipeline and customer release branches.
- Run a mature, tiered support function: L1 triage and monitoring, L2 resolution, and L3/SME escalation, with clear routing, ownership, and customer communication at every tier.
- Be the senior escalation point of contact for high-demand and strategic accounts (e.g., Wells Fargo and similar enterprise clients), and drive the satisfaction, retention, and trust outcomes those relationships depend on.
- Mature the operation away from heroics: reduce reliance on a small pool of US resources, and expand self-service, knowledge bases, and automation so support demand diminishes as the platform matures.
Tech Architecture (function lead)
- Serve as the senior technical authority owning solution design and integration readiness across strategic and growth accounts.
- Lead discovery of customer enterprise tech environments and drive tech fitment and gap analysis (customer stack vs. Skan platform stack).
- Own end-to-end solution and integration architecture design, deployment-model selection (cloud, hybrid, on-prem), and HA/DR and backup design patterns.
- Provide architecture review and sign-off as the gate for delivery handoff, and build a repeatable library of reference architectures that shorten enterprise time-to-deploy.
Continuous coverage (US-hours anchor)
- Anchor the North America desk (approx. 08:00–20:00 ET) and own the quality of the warm handoff to and from the India desk.
- Partner with Selva so coverage, on-call tiering, holiday cross-cover, and end-of-shift discipline function as a single 24×7 global operation.
- Be the senior decision-maker reachable during US hours for Sev-1 incidents and customer-impacting events.
Teams You'll Lead
Customer Ops is targeted to scale to roughly 21 people across NA and India (this leadership hire is incremental to that count). Reporting lines include:
- Tech Onboarding — platform and client tech requirements, solution architecture and gap analysis, tech validation, and structured handoff (lead: Eric Edwards).
- Service Desk & SRE — L1 triage and routing, L2/L3 escalation management, troubleshooting, knowledge base, and per-tenant production reliability and on-call (leads: Eric Edwards / Kevin Curtis).
- Tech Architecture — the architecture authority described above, led directly by this Director.
Key Collaboration
- Delivery Engineering — the single most important partnership. Delivery Engineering owns customer deployments, release branches, and the Customer DevSecOps build; Customer Ops owns what happens after and around deployment. The Director and Selva jointly own the follow-the-sun model and the deployment-to-operations seam.
- Skan Product Architecture & Engineering — deep, continuous collaboration is essential. The Director works with the CTO office and Product Engineering on tech and product strategy, feeds field and architecture signals back into the product, and coordinates on bug remediation, redeployments, and hotfixes.
- Customer DevSecOps and the platform, specialist, and FinOps functions — on environment build, capacity planning, upgrades, and cost.
What Success Looks Like
- Customer environments are architecturally sound and integration-ready at handoff, reducing rework and post-go-live defects.
- Reliable, well-instrumented production operations with strong SLO attainment and fast, clean incident and escalation handling.
- Architecture sign-off on 100% of strategic-account deployments; design cycle ≤ 15 days; integration defects reduced ~50%; a growing library of reusable reference architectures.
- A genuinely global, two-desk operation with seamless handoffs — US-hours coverage no longer bottlenecked on a fragile pool of individuals.
- Rising customer satisfaction and trust on strategic and high-demand accounts.
What You Bring
- 15+ years in customer operations, delivery, SRE, or technical services, with significant leadership of distributed, multi-region teams (NA + India experience strongly preferred).
- A strong solution/integration architecture background — credible as the senior technical authority signing off enterprise deployments. Comfortable with deployment models across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem, and with HA/DR design.
- Proven ownership of end-to-end production operations: tiered support (L1–L3), incident and escalation management, SLOs, and on-call.
- Track record managing demanding enterprise/regulated customers as the senior escalation owner.
- Working fluency with the modern delivery stack — GKE/Kubernetes, Harness CI/CD, Terraform/Helm, observability, and policy-as-code — enough to lead architects and SREs credibly and partner with DevSecOps.
- A collaborative operator who builds bridges with product architecture and engineering rather than gatekeeping, and who can run a follow-the-sun partnership as one team.
- Willingness and availability to anchor US-hours coverage and serve as the senior point of contact for customer-impacting events.
Why Join Skan AI?
- Be part of a category-creating company building the full agentic lifecycle.
- Join a passionate, global team united by curiosity, integrity, and impact.
- In-office and remote work mix with global exposure.
- Competitive compensation and equity opportunities.
Benefits
- Private medical and dental insurance
- Pension / retirement contribution
- Life assurance and income protection
- Generous paid annual leave plus public holidays
- Enhanced parental leave
- Hybrid and remote working
- Stock Option Plan
Skan AI is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and respectful workplace around the world. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion or belief, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital or family status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws in the locations where we operate.
We welcome people from all backgrounds and provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.