Customer Success & Support Lead

About Foundry

Foundry is a venture platform for founders — combining a web platform (bootcamps, pitch simulation, AI-assisted tools, content) with live programming. We serve individual founders directly and partner institutions who run cohorts of their own founders on our platform.

The role

You will run Foundry's customer success and support operation day to day — for individual founders (B2C) and partner institutions running cohorts (B2B). This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role: you personally answer users, resolve issues, and keep partners looked after, working under the direction of Foundry's product and technology lead.
It's also a deeply cross-disciplinary role. A founder's question might touch programming (sessions, schedules, recordings), business development (partner commitments, enrollment), product (a confusing flow), or platform and technology (accounts, access, bugs). Your job is to be the connective tissue: keep one organized customer success system and process across all of these functions, so that every issue reaches the right owner, gets resolved, and comes back to the user closed — no matter how many teams it crossed on the way.
You'll work alongside the team and our AI agents — much of our support workflow is AI-assisted, and you'll direct, review, and quality-control that work rather than doing everything by hand.

What you'll do

Support operations (B2C)

• Manage the support inbox and ticket queue daily: triage, prioritize, resolve or route to the right owner, verify the fix, and close the loop with the user.
• Answer founders with clear, kind, professional communication — including when they're stressed, confused, or frustrated.
• Work with our AI agents on triage, drafting, and follow-up: direct them, review their output, and own the final quality of everything that reaches a user.
• Keep the reply templates and participant FAQ current as questions evolve.

Partner success (B2B)

• Be the named, reachable contact for partner cohorts: run check-in cadences, deliver cohort updates, and handle escalations promptly.
• Coordinate cohort onboarding internally (accounts, enrollment, access, schedules) so launches are smooth for the partner.
• Flag partner risks and opportunities early to Foundry leadership.

Cross-functional coordination

• Keep one organized customer success system across programming, business development, product, platform, and technology — shared process, clear handoffs, visible status on every open issue.
• Chase cross-team issues to resolution: you own the user's outcome even when the fix belongs to another function.
• Surface the patterns behind tickets — recurring problems, confusing flows, gaps — as well-formed reports the product and programming teams can act on.
• Work closely with other teams to improve our support and success process

What we're looking for

Required

• Experience running a support system on a ticketing system such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, or JSM) within a defined support process — SLAs, triage, escalation, closing the loop.
• Professionalism and outstanding written communication: clear, kind, caring — with founders, senior partner stakeholders, and teammates alike.
• Comfort with technology, including AI systems as a working tool — you use them daily, direct them confidently, and know when to trust or override their output.
• Ability to coordinate across many functions without authority — following up, keeping threads organized, and getting to resolution through clarity and persistence.
• Reliability and follow-through: nothing falls through the cracks on your watch.
• Sound judgment on prioritization and escalation; calm under a full queue.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting founders, students, or program participants (edtech, accelerators, executive education, higher ed).
• Experience as a client- or partner-facing point of contact for institutional customers.
• Familiarity with cohort-based programs (enrollment cycles, reporting, program ops).
• Experience tracking and reporting operational metrics (volume, response time, resolution rate).

Your ramp

Month 1 — Learn and take the queue. Learn the product, programs, and support playbook. Shadow the current process, then take daily ownership of the inbox and queue using the existing templates and FAQ. Meet each function you'll coordinate with — programming, business development, product, platform, technology — and each active partner. By the end of the month, the queue is yours: every inbound triaged, answered, or routed same-day.
Month 3 — Run the full operation. Both sides are running through you: the B2C queue on defined response targets, and every partner cohort on a named check-in and reporting cadence. Cross-team issues move through one organized process with clear handoffs, and you're the person everyone trusts to know the status of any open issue. You're fluent in the AI-assisted workflow and keeping templates and the FAQ current on your own.
Month 6 — Operate with leverage and improve. The operation runs smoothly without daily direction: leadership hears about problems from you before anyone else does. You're actively improving the system — refining the process, strengthening the AI-assisted workflow, closing recurring root causes with the relevant teams — and partner relationships are strong enough that renewals and expansion conversations start from trust you've built. A cohort launch is routine for you end-to-end.
 
One open item: D1 — Lead vs Specialist. I titled it "Lead" with "Specialist" as the noted alternative — pick one and I'll drop the other line.