Chef Software is the industry leader in IT automation and DevOps solutions. We are a dynamic and rapidly growing software company with a strong sense of dedication to our customers and the Chef community. We work hard but try not to take ourselves too seriously. This is a very collaborative and inclusive work environment where individuals strong on aptitude and attitude will have an opportunity to grow their professional careers through working with some of the most advanced technology and talented developers in the business. We provide competitive compensation, generous benefits, and a professional yet relaxed atmosphere.

At Chef, we develop the world's best products for managing applications and infrastructure at scale, and we deploy them against real problems in all kinds of industries. We’re writing the rules of the cloud -- rules the world’s top engineers live, breathe and contribute to. Our platform is used to enable hundreds of millions of people around the world to chat, fly, present, bank, game, shop, and learn. Chances are the web applications you use every day have infrastructure built, deployed, secured and ran with our code.

The Chef Customer Success Team operates globally, and includes Customer Success Management, Technical Success, Professional Services, and Support. These teams work together closely to execute on programs and playbooks that enable our customers to become successful and grow.

Chef is looking for a Director of Customer Support to evolve our support function to the next level of greatness. We are seeking someone who sees a support function as a strategic asset, and can work closely with our customers as well as other internal teams to fully realize that opportunity.

This role requires a candidate with solid communications skills and a deep understanding of infrastructure, systems engineering, and coding/scripting. The ideal candidate will have led and scaled support organizations, familiar with the systems and processes, and is a strong people leader. The right person for this role will be expected to understand our commercial mission, have empathy for our customer’s experience, and have a vision for the next stage in the evolution of our support offering and organization.

This position can be done from any location, but candidates in Seattle, WA are preferable at this time.

Responsibilities

• Manage a geographically diverse team across global time zones and foster unity and team cohesion
• Engages and collaborates with other Chef leaders to design and implement new support processes, incident management procedures, SLA offerings, and create tools and technologies that support all of the above.
• Build enablement processes to facilitate team expertise in new technologies and Chef products
• Ability to quickly recognize business goals and translate into team direction and focus
• Ensures we meet our support obligations, and provide transparency of our results to internal leadership as well as the customer
• Be a role model for customer focused empathy and recognize that doing the right thing for the customer is the primary objective
• Engage in the customer lifecycle and provide feedback into product direction
• Identifies trends and themes in the volume of tickets we receive, and provides insightful knowledge to upstream Chef teams that can drive changes to reduce ticket volume
• Establish and manage incident post mortem and root cause analysis processes to ensure continuous learning and improvement
• Attract and retain top level support engineering talent and establish a highly desirable working environment and team atmosphere
• Develop plans and strategies to expand our hours of coverage, our ability to handle resolution SLA’s, and additional enhancements to our set of support offerings
• Organizes and coordinates engineering efforts of the support engineering team to ensure the highest impact and value is achieved
• Act as the primary leadership face to the customers when escalations occur

Required Qualifications

• 5 - 7 years managing a highly functioning support organization or technical operations team
• 3-5 years experience in Systems Engineering / Administration with firm understanding of Unix/Linux and Windows architectures.
• Familiar with Zendesk, Salesforce, and other support tools
• Strong analytical ability, including identify trends in large data sets 
• Previous experience being primary customer facing leader during incident escalation events
• Passion for learning, collaborating with others and being an all-around customer advocate.
• A love for debugging complex technical issues at every level of a modern application stack.
• Experience with automation tools such as Chef preferable.
• Experience with JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, or Python programming is a plus.
• Experience with version control (e.g. git) is preferable
• Strong written and verbal communications skills mandatory for this role. You will be tested on your ability to write cohesive, cognitive and concise customer communications during the interview, as well as converse in difficult customer situations. An ability to communicate effectively under pressure is absolutely mandatory.

At Chef, we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our products and our community to flourish. Chef is honored to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation or Veteran status.