Founding Customer Operations Lead

Specter • San Francisco, CA

2d

About The Position

Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world. We build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

The Customer Operations role is accountable for keeping Specter working for every customer. When we or a customer identify an issue, proactively communicate, triage, and resolve it. One person owns the problem from the first report to resolution. Success is measured by reliability: we catch issues before our customers do and fix them fast.

As our Founding Customer Operations Lead, you will partner closely with engineering (fix what breaks, catch it before the customer does), deployment operations (sustain hardware in the field), and deployment strategy (get customers to value, expand, and renew). You’ll also own the customer onboarding experience, giving every Specter user a personalized first impression with the platform. If Deployment Strategy is offense, Customer Operations is defense.

We build hardware and software so our support mandate is much more expansive than a typical SaaS company. About half of what breaks is physical: radio links, site power, mothernodes, firmware, weather. The other half is software and ML: missed detections, false positives, software bugs. Our users span a variety of industries and technical ability.

Your mission is to deliver a support experience that customers and internal teams love, and build the systems that let us do it without linearly scaling our people. If successful, this operational layer will be the foundation on which we build Specter's physical AI and robotics platform.

Requirements

• Navigated messy enterprise accounts from early pilots through multi-million dollar expansions.
• Can earn the trust of opinionated engineers (we have many!).
• Have built out processes across product, finance, or customer experience that scale.
• Have good hospitality instincts. Responsiveness, polish, consistency, and sweating the details matter.
• Find joy in distilling complex ideas (customer discovery, technical topics, strategic questions) into what’s essential.
• Can successfully influence product without having direct ownership over it.

Responsibilities

• Own every customer issue from first report to resolution. Acknowledge issues in minutes, triage, loop in the right on-call engineer or deployment operations lead, keep the customer updated, and close the loop with a root cause.
• Catch issues before our customers do. Live in fleet telemetry and PagerDuty. Own the question “why didn’t we catch this first?” and partner with engineering to close these gaps.
• Understand the details of our product (platform, ML, firmware, hardware, RF). Know the difference between a radio issue, a site power issue, and a bad prompt. Have intuition around when we deploy our team onsite to address.
• Build systems that help us deliver unreasonable hospitality at scale. Meet customers where they are (Slack, Teams, email, text, phone). Remember context from previous interactions. Make our users look good intentionally. Aspire to a “wow, this is beyond what I expected” experience every time.
• Do things agentically. We use Pylon for support issues today but there is a lot to be built that helps us scale excellent support without scaling our people.
• Reduce noise. Distill repeat issues into product features that engineering can build. Minimize anxiety and disruption for customers and internal teams.
• Operationalize technical diligence pre-sales: SLA requirements, integrations, security questionnaires, “can we actually deliver this?” We don’t have a solutions engineering team today. Expect to be helpful pre-sales as needed to ensure we can deliver on customer requirements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed