[Hiring] Head of Support @Tern Travel

Role Description

Tern has 11,000 travel advisors on the platform today. We'll have 20,000 by year end. The support team is the foundation that determines whether they will succeed on the platform. Most support orgs at this scale are still reacting. More tickets, more headcount, repeat. We're not doing this. AI is embedded into almost every single workflow as a force multiplier for our human team. We need someone to wire it all together. That's this role.

What You'll Do

• Own the support operation end to end. Set the standard for what AI handles vs. what escalates to a human, keep FRT under 30 minutes, and hold CSAT at 95%+ across both AI and human-resolved tickets.
• Build a content production system that keeps pace with Tern's weekly R&D shipping cycle. Training content aligned to new capabilities, not just beginner features, scenario-based, async-first, and available before advisors have to ask.
• Own the Tern & Learn curriculum. Audit what exists, restructure it into a sequenced learning path, and tie every milestone to advisor activation metrics- key feature adoption at 30, 60, and 90 days on platform.
• Partner with R&D to embed enablement directly in the product. Work with the advisor AI squad to prioritize in-product onboarding flows that meet advisors where they are, for the persona they are, and deliver the right answer at the right time.
• Collaborate with the implementation team on agency transitions. Create the resources agencies need to onboard their teams, then own those advisors at scale once they're live.
• Lead a team of around 8 support and education specialists across the US and Philippines. Run the weekly cadence, set team standards, coach individuals, and build the playbook they execute every day.
• Instrument and own the metrics: FRT, CSAT, AI resolution rate, advisor feature adoption at 30/60/90 days, and actual resolved issues where the advisor didn't abandon their need.

Qualifications

• You've been in the queue and managed the queue. Whether you started in support and moved into management, or came up through training and had to learn operations along the way, you know both sides and can operate on both when it matters.
• Experience building scalable education programs at a B2B SaaS company that sells to SMB or mid-market businesses. You've done this before and have data to show what changed because of it.
• Experience optimizing a help center and support operation to drive advisor behavior change, not just answer volume. You measure success by feature adoption and retention, not just deflection rates.
• A track record of building measurement into education programs from day one- you know what activation looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days and you build toward it.
• People management experience with distributed teams. You can run a 1:1, give hard feedback, develop junior ICs, and hold the team to a standard even when stretched.
• Operational instincts. You set metrics, build dashboards, and use data to decide where to focus.
• You're genuinely comfortable as both a coach and an individual contributor. You can run a training for an agency, jump into a support queue during a busy stretch, and manage a team- sometimes in the same week, without losing your footing in any of it.

Bonus Points

• You've worked through a support scaling inflection where volume grew faster than headcount could and you built smarter systems to keep up.
• You've partnered with a product or engineering team to get enablement workflows prioritized and shipped inside the product itself.
• You've built training content for solo operators or small business owners running their own businesses, not internal teams or enterprise IT buyers.
• You've designed a live training program (office hours, webinars, cohort sessions) that worked alongside async content rather than substituting for it.

Why This Role is Exciting

You've built learning management systems, been in the queue, and scaled the queue. Now you have the chance to take what you know works from a traditional standpoint and supercharge it with AI. Automate what can be automated, meet advisors where they already are, and deploy a human team in the places that actually move the needle. The mission is clear: activate advisors to be self-sufficient at scale. The tools are here. What's missing is the person who knows how to put them together.

Why Join Tern?

• Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space.
• Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team.
• Influence and shape our user success strategy from the ground up.
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.
• Tern is committed to building a team that represents people from many different backgrounds and life experiences, reflecting our worldview coinciding with the users and customers we serve across the world.