Head of Technical Support

Job description

📍 London (Hybrid — 2 days onsite) 🕒 Permanent | Start ASAP ## **We’re Making Travel Effortless. Join Us.** Travel is essential, whether it’s visiting family, starting a new adventure, or taking a career defining trip. Yet today, over 4 billion airline passengers rely on tech that hasn't changed in decades. At Duffel, we’re rebuilding the infrastructure underpinning the global travel industry. Backed by top-tier investors (Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures, and Kima Ventures) and born out of Y Combinator (S18), we’re simplifying complex systems to build the future of travel **About the role** As Head of Technical Support, you’ll lead our team of Technical Support Engineers and take responsibility for the quality, effectiveness and development of the function. You’ll build a team that combines strong technical investigation with clear, thoughtful customer communication. You’ll coach engineers, establish effective ways of working and ensure customers receive dependable support as their integrations grow in complexity and scale. You’ll stay close to the work: reviewing investigations, helping with significant escalations and understanding where our products or processes create friction. Your impact will come from strengthening the whole team’s ability to resolve problems and turning what we learn from support into lasting improvements. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, Partner Engineering, Partner Management and Travel Operations. Technical Support owns day-to-day API questions, troubleshooting and the customer support response to technical incidents. Partner Engineers own strategic technical relationships and solution architecture; Implementation Managers own implementation programmes. **What you’ll do** - **Lead and develop the team.** Set clear expectations, provide regular coaching and feedback, support career development and address performance issues constructively. Hire and onboard engineers as the team grows. - **Own support quality.** Establish standards for technical investigation, written communication, case ownership and follow-through. Ensure customers understand what is happening, what comes next and who is responsible. - **Build a dependable support operation.** Improve triage, prioritisation, queue management, handovers and escalation paths. Plan staffing and coverage around customer needs and agreed service commitments, with a sustainable workload for the team. - **Strengthen technical capability.** Help engineers investigate API behaviour, interpret logs and request traces, reproduce integration issues and distinguish customer configuration problems from platform or supplier issues. - **Lead significant customer escalations.** Coordinate the support response, establish customer impact and keep communication clear through to resolution. Work with Engineering on diagnosis and recovery, involving Partner Engineering where an issue creates a wider strategic risk. - **Make collaboration effective.** Give Engineering actionable escalation reports with evidence, reproduction steps and impact. Work with Travel Operations on booking and supplier issues, and with implementation teams to ensure new integrations enter support with the context the team needs. - **Improve the product through support.** Identify recurring problems and turn them into clear recommendations for Product and Engineering. Track whether fixes, documentation and product changes actually reduce customer friction. - **Make support easier to deliver.** Develop troubleshooting guides, internal knowledge, customer documentation and useful tooling. Apply automation and AI where they improve accuracy, speed and access to help. - **Use evidence to guide decisions.** Monitor response and resolution performance, ageing work, reopened cases, customer feedback and team capacity. Use that information to prioritise improvements and make clear recommendations about investment. **What we’re looking for** - Experience managing and developing a technical support or support engineering team serving business customers. - A track record of improving both customer outcomes and how a support function operates. - Strong technical understanding of APIs, HTTP, authentication, webhooks and integrations, with enough practical depth to guide investigations and earn the trust of engineers. - Comfort working with logs, SQL and scripts to investigate problems or improve support workflows. - Experience handling consequential customer escalations, including situations where the cause or resolution is initially uncertain. - Ability to explain technical issues to developers, business stakeholders and senior leaders. - Sound judgement about urgency, customer impact and competing priorities. - Evidence of effective hiring, coaching, performance management and delegation. - The ability to influence Product, Engineering and commercial teams through clear reasoning and useful evidence. - Comfort building and improving a function in a growing company, while remaining involved in its day-to-day work. **Experience that would be useful** - Supporting an API platform, developer product or infrastructure business. - Working with enterprise customers running important production integrations. - Leading support across different time zones. - Improving support tooling, knowledge management, self-service or automation. - Experience in travel technology, payments or another industry with complex external dependencies. *You don’t need to have worked in travel or held this exact title. We’re interested in the teams you’ve developed, the problems you’ve solved and the judgement you bring.* **What success looks like** During your first six months: - Engineers have clear expectations, regular coaching and practical development plans. - Customer issues have clear ownership, appropriate prioritisation and dependable communication. - You have established a trustworthy baseline for support performance and delivered measurable improvements in the most important areas. - Escalations reach the right teams with better evidence and fewer unnecessary handovers. - Recurring problems are being addressed through product changes, documentation or tooling. - Duffel has a clear plan for the support capacity and capabilities needed as the business grows. ## **Why You’ll Love Working at Duffel** We believe in true ownership. That’s why every permanent employee gets equity in the business. **Perks That Actually Matter:** ✈️ **Travel Allowance:** We literally pay you to get out of town and explore the world. 🏝️ **Work From Anywhere:** Flexibility is built in. Work remotely, or take advantage of our **Sabbatical Policy**. ⚡ **Electric Car Scheme:** Roll up in a brand-new EV with eco-friendly tax savings. **⚖️ Work-Life Harmony:** Flexible bank holidays, generous family leave, and a dedicated volunteering day. 📚 **Growth Tools:** Paid study days to level up your skills, plus a solid pension and cycle-to-work scheme. 🏥 **Health & Wellbeing:** Private healthcare, eye test cover, and season ticket loans. 🏡 **Family Leave (maternity, paternity and adoption):** Big support for life’s biggest moments, **26 weeks fully paid.** ### **The Details** **📍 Location:** Shoreditch, London (Hybrid: In-office Tuesdays & Thursdays). **🧠 Interview Process:** Simple & transparent: *(change accordingly to role)* 1. Recruiter Screen 2. Hiring Manager Chat 3. Technical Case Study 4. Final Stage Interview. **We are an equal opportunities employer. We believe that the key to our success is employing a diverse team, that's why recruitment decisions are only based on your experience and skills. We value your ability to problem solve and build amazing things so we welcome applications for everyone - regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion or belief.** ***Note to recruitment agencies** Duffel does not accept speculative CV's from external parties. Any unsolicited CV's sent to us will be treated as property of Duffel, and any attached terms and conditions associated with these CV's will be null and void.*