Support Manager

Job Description

Who we are

Element is the startup which employs the core team behind Matrix— the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.

Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email— allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations and ultimately be in control of their own communication.

Practically speaking this means building open, self-sovereign alternatives to WhatsApp/Slack/Teams for governments, civic institutions and communities. At one end of the scale, the French government has adopted Matrix for all of its instant messaging needs and more recently we delivered the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service helping schools in Germany support remote learning. On the other end of the scale, open-source communities such as Mozilla have adopted Element for all of its community chat replacing IRCOur main commercial targets are Governments and the enterprise segment. Element also runs the largest public matrix server, home of more than 12 millions users out of the 40 millions total users currently.In July 2021, we raised another $30 million in Series-B funding . We’re at the cusp of Element uncontrollably exploding across our computers and phones in much the same manner that Netscape once did in the early days of the Web - or email did over the early Internet. The world has truly woken up to the age of decentralised communication.

The Role

Reporting to the Head of SAAS you will lead and grow the Support team at Element.

More concretely you will:-

• Take responsibility for the overall effectiveness of the Support team.
• Grow the support team to provide (follow-the-sun) 24x7x365 coverage, initially hiring in the UK/EU then APAC region
• Shape and communicate the strategy for your area.
• Partner with your peers to ensure strong alignment between your team’s goals and the broader company strategy.
• Ensure that your engineers are well supported to deliver on their goals, course-correcting where necessary.
• Take responsibility for the ongoing professional development of your engineers.
• Contribute to the hiring strategy and participate in interviews and hiring decisions.
• Act as a point of contact for other areas of the business.
• Relentlessly remove impediments blocking your team.

The team operates remotely in predominantly European locations. We have aggressive hiring plans in 2021/22 and the role has a lot of potential for growth. Previous remote management experience is not a hard requirement but those new to it may benefit from being able to regularly spend some time in the London office.

Since (almost) everything we do is open source [1] [2] you can get a great feel for exactly what it would be like to work on Element - joining dev-centric channels such as #element-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!

Requirements

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Experience growing a globally distributed support team
• Strong line management skills
• Strong conflict resolution and customer service
• High attention to detail (no issues left unhandled)
• You place a tremendous value on good communication and appreciate async and remote-friendly working practices.
• You are comfortable with the pace and trade-offs of an early-stage startup (meaning: know how to take care of yourself and your team, get your work done without working around the clock, prioritise ruthlessly, be able to tolerate a little uncertainty and sometimes wear different hats).

Nice to haves

It would nice if any of the following were true.

• Some previous history working in an open-source environment, either professionally or as a community member.
• An interest/experience in the world of decentralised technology and/or messaging technology.
• You have managed remote staff or have worked remotely yourself. Element is a highly distributed organisation and we continually strive to improve our remote experience.

If you have any questions before making an application reach out to Mischa (@mischawalmsley:matrix.org) via https://app.element.io

Benefits

Our general approach is to treat people like adults and acknowledge that by being flexible we create an environment for people to do their best work. For more details here is our manifesto.

That said specific points that differentiate us.

• Work (almost) full time on FOSS projects with high visibility and a large enthusiastic community
• The chance to work with large scale governmental installations through to high profile FOSS projects such as Mozilla or KDE.
• Option to work partially or fully remote (our head office is in London), we offer flexibility and consider ourselves to be a family friendly environment.
• People tend to stay with the company for a long time, we take this as a sign that we have a cohesive supportive culture, that we have engaging challenging work and that people can develop their skills and careers here for the long term.

Element does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.