Director of Support and Services

About Sona Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them. Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past. We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here (https://www.sona.ai/careers). About the Role: The Director of Support and Services is responsible for building and scaling an AI-first support function. This is a hands-on leadership role combining agent architecture, operational design, product collaboration, and team leadership to solve support at scale without scaling headcount at the same rate. The role owns the support operating model end to end, defining what agents solve, when they escalate, how they improve, and how humans supervise them. You'll work closely with Product, ML, and Engineering to architect agent behaviour, identify the systemic friction agents miss, and continuously raise agent capability. You'll also lead a lean team focused on configuration, quality monitoring, and exception handling, rather than on taking tickets directly. Success looks agentic: resolution rates, accuracy, cost per resolution, and how much human time the agents save. If you built a traditional, high-performing support team here, we'd consider that a miss. The aim is support infrastructure where agents are the production layer and humans orchestrate them. Responsibilities: - Design and own the agentic support operating model, defining what problems agents solve end to end, which require escalation, at what thresholds, and what triggers human review. Own the configuration layer that lets you evolve agent behaviour without shipping code. - Architect multi-tier agent routing and escalation logic, matching agent assignments to customer segment (self-service, assisted, premium, white-glove) to maximise agent resolution while maintaining quality thresholds. - Own the cost model around agent operation, human supervision overhead, and escalation. Use agent data to decide when to invest further in agent capability and when to escalate to humans instead. - Own agent quality and capability metrics, establishing KPIs that track resolution rates, accuracy, customer satisfaction, and human exception workload. Run regular retrospectives on agent failures to identify systematic fixes. - Work closely with Product and ML to improve agent behaviour, identify friction points agents miss or mishandle, and make the commercial case for whether to train the agent, escalate, or fix the product. Prototype new agent capabilities and guide their build. - Direct a dedicated engineering resource to build agent infrastructure, including orchestration logic, intelligent routing, multi-turn resolution agents, predictive issue detection, and self-service expansions. You define what agent behaviours to build. They build the plumbing. - Build and lead a lean, high-performing orchestration team, small by traditional support standards, that owns agent configuration, quality monitoring, exception handling, and continuous improvement. The focus is systemic improvement, not heroic individual performance. - Define tiered support and services models based on customer segment and agent capability, and define white-glove or premium services where human expertise is the differentiator. Requirements: - 7+ years in customer support, customer success, or operations roles, including at least 2 years in a leadership capacity. You've operated at scale and understand support economics. - Hands-on experience building or scaling AI-first workflows where AI is the production layer. You've defined what an AI system should do, found its failure modes, and iterated on its behaviour yourself, rather than just evaluating vendor solutions. - Deep familiarity with agentic systems and LLM behaviour. You understand agent limitations, failure modes, and hallucination risks, and how to structure problems so agents succeed. You can read traces, identify where agents are going wrong, and communicate fixes to engineers. - A track record of solving problems systematically through configuration and process design, not by scaling headcount. You've built tiered models, designed escalation logic, and found ways to multiply your team's impact without adding headcount. - Able to reason about trade-offs in agent design. You understand the tension between agent autonomy (speed, scale) and human oversight (quality, safety), and can make the commercial case for where to draw those lines. - Comfortable identifying friction and building solutions. You don't wait for process to exist. You move in ambiguity and iterate rapidly. - Bonus: experience in SaaS, a background in product, engineering, or data, experience building observability or quality frameworks for AI/ML systems, large-scale customer operations or contact centre modernisation experience, or prior experience with agent orchestration platforms. Benefits: - Hybrid working pattern (3+ days per week in our London office) - Share options - 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days) - Extra day of leave for every year of service - Pension contributions matched up to 5% - Comprehensive health insurance - Enhanced parental leave & pay - Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery) - Annual all expenses paid team retreats - The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office - Professional development budget - Unlimited free books Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.