Support Engineering Lead

About the role

We're looking for a Support Engineering Lead to own and scale the technical support experience at Sardine. This role sits at the intersection of deep technical ownership, people leadership, and operational excellence. You'll lead a team of Support Engineers who resolve complex issues across Sardine's API-driven fraud and payments platform, while building the processes, tooling, and culture that enable the team to operate at a high level across global time zones.

You'll be a player-coach with a strong technical foundation, someone who has written code before, understands systems at depth, and isn't afraid to get into the weeds of a hard problem. You know how to lead people, but your instinct is always to understand the technical reality first. You've worked in startups and know what it means to move fast, own outcomes, and build things that didn't exist before. The ideal candidate brings the structure and experience of a larger company with the scrappiness and bias for action of a startup operator.

What you'll be doing

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Support Engineers, driving accountability, continuous growth, and a high-performance culture

• Own service delivery end-to-end, acting as the primary escalation point for complex technical issues and enterprise customer situations

• Get hands-on when it counts, diving into tickets, debugging API issues, joining customer calls, and leading incident response alongside your team

• Build and enforce operational processes including incident management, escalation playbooks, and internal quality review frameworks

• Define and track team metrics and dashboards, using data to identify trends, surface systemic issues, and drive continuous improvement

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Customer Success to advocate for customer needs and influence platform improvements

• Champion AI and automation adoption, including Pylon's AI Assistant, to improve team productivity and service quality

• Lead hiring, onboarding, and career development to scale the support organization as Sardine grows

• Represent the support function in cross-functional forums and contribute to strategic decisions with customer insights and operational data

What you'll bring

• 7+ years in technical support, support engineering, software engineering, or a related technical role, ideally with a background that includes hands-on development or engineering experience

• 3+ years managing technical support teams, including performance management and coaching

• Hands-on technical background, prior software development experience is a strong plus

• Proficiency with SQL and REST APIs; comfortable using debugging and observability tools

• Experience in both startup and larger company environments

• Experience running high-volume support operations with enterprise SLAs and on-call responsibilities

• Able to go deep technically and lead people effectively, both matter in this role

• Track record of building or improving processes around incident response, escalations, and service quality

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience