[Hiring] Senior Support Engineer @Thorn

Role Description

At Thorn, our cause is our code. We are a nonprofit whose mission of defending children from sexual exploitation and abuse is deeply embedded within our core—a shared code that drives us to do challenging work with resilience and determination.

As a Senior Support Engineer, you’ll provide deep technical guidance and reliable support to ensure a top-tier experience for our growing and diverse customer base across products like Safer and Thorn Detect.

You will also contribute to the continued evolution of Support by building and improving tooling, workflows, and automations that make our work more effective and scalable, including thoughtfully applying AI and emerging technologies where they can have meaningful impact.

What You’ll Do

• Guide customers through the full customer journey for products like Safer and Thorn Detect, supporting both standard and complex implementations and troubleshooting technical issues across a wide range of scenarios.
• Provide timely, thoughtful support to users with varying technical backgrounds, independently resolving more complex issues and determining when escalation to Product, Engineering, or Account Managers is required.
• Design, build, maintain, and improve tooling for Support, translating recurring support needs and operational challenges into scalable technical solutions.
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve Support workflows through tooling and automation, developing solutions that increase team efficiency, scalability, and the support experience.
• Identify opportunities to thoughtfully apply AI and emerging technologies to Support tooling, workflows, and automations where they can provide meaningful value.
• Operate as a technical advocate for customers by clearly communicating their needs, questions, and constraints to internal teams, while balancing customer expectations with technical realities.
• Lead support for complex, high-impact customer use cases, serving as a go-to resource for advanced troubleshooting and implementation nuances.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Science, UX, Account Managers, and Sales to support a cohesive experience for prospects and customers from onboarding, support, and ongoing product use.
• Identify recurring issues, friction points, and opportunities for improvement across customer interactions, and proactively share insights to improve processes, tooling, and our products.
• Use and improve support tooling such as ticketing systems, Slack, Zoom, and email to track requests, document resolutions, and ensure clear communication and timely follow-through internally and externally.
• Own and improve key areas of internal and customer-facing documentation, including onboarding materials, support guides, and best practices to help scale the Support Engineering team’s effectiveness.
• Mentor and support other Support Engineers by sharing best practices, providing guidance on complex cases, and helping level up the team’s technical judgement.

Qualifications

• Commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do.
• Strong experience providing technical support to customers, with the ability to diagnose complex issues, resolve nuanced problems independently, and determine when and how to escalate effectively.
• Experience building, maintaining, or improving internal or Support-focused tooling that solves operational problems or enables teams to work more effectively.
• A proactive, test-and-learn mindset, with the curiosity to explore new technical approaches and the persistence to turn experimentation into meaningful improvements for the team.
• Hands-on experience applying AI technologies to improve tools, workflows, integrations, or automations, with the judgment to identify opportunities where AI can reduce manual effort, surface insights, and support human decision-making.
• Clear, efficient, and thoughtful communication with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience communicating directly with external users, with a strong commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, reactive environment with sound judgment when prioritizing shifting customer needs, technical constraints, and competing requests.
• Ability to identify gaps, recurring friction, or inefficiencies, and contribute to improving support workflows and practices.
• Independent time and workload management, handling complex or high-impact support cases while proactively improving documentation or processes.
• Proactive communication with customers by setting clear expectations, navigating ambiguity, and maintaining trust through thoughtful updates and follow-up.
• Strong documentation ownership, contributing to and improving onboarding materials, support guides, and internal resources.
• Structured thinking and persistence in approaching complex problems, drawing on experience to troubleshoot edge cases and guide investigations toward resolution.
• Deeper technical familiarity with systems, integrations, and customer environments, continuing to grow expertise in ways that benefit both customers and teammates.
• Collaboration with teammates and cross-functional partners, representing Support Engineering perspectives clearly and constructively.
• Empathy and advocacy for users while balancing customer needs with technical realities.

Technologies We Use

• Jira Service Manager (JSM) / Github / Docusaurus
• Docker / Kubernetes / Terraform
• AWS / Google Cloud
• Amazon SQS / Google PubSub / RabbitMQ / Kafka
• Node / Python 3 / TypeScript
• PostgreSQL / Elasticsearch
• AI APIs / Generative AI tools

Compensation and Benefits

• A reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role is $79,000 - $109,250/year.
• Remote-first work model with occasional travel for company gatherings and team-building events.
• A broad range of benefits offered to employees.