Support & AI Operations Lead
- $110k – $160k • 0.1% – 0.3%
- Remote (United States) • Austin
- 6 years of exp
- Full Time
About the job
About Backpack
Backpack is building the financial infrastructure for the $1.8 Trillion higher education market.
We connect universities with everyone who pays them, reducing friction to make education more accessible and affordable. Our wedge is becoming the national clearinghouse for external payments in the US, starting with 529 plans, prepaid plans, scholarships, and third-party payers. From that foundation, we expand in two directions: becoming the universal payments API for education institutions, and ultimately the financial operating system that powers every dollar flowing in and out of an education institution.
A few things we're proud of:
- Have built the first connected banking platform in higher education
- We are the largest digital disbursement network for outside scholarships in the US
- Early partners are some of the country's largest universities, including The University of Alabama, The University of Chicago, Arizona State University and Miami University.
- Processing tens of millions in payment volume from thousands of external payees that include Fortune 500 companies, State and Federal Government Organizations, and some of the largest wealth management companies in the country.
- Raised $12M in venture funding from Walkabout Ventures, Mischief Ventures and Core VC, as well as founders and executives from Plaid, SoFi, Brex, Chime, Square and many others.
About the team
We like to think we are an ambitious, creative and fun group all brought together through a shared mission of improving accessibility and affordability of education.
We extreme take pride in meeting and exceeding the set of standards we defined as a team:
- We obsess over crafting quality products and infrastructure
- We collaborate without ego
- We aim to raise the bar for our industry, users and team members every day
- We continuously enhance our payments network
- We are compassionately direct with each other and our partners
- We are blameless and accountable - a powerful combination
- Importantly, we have fun doing it.
The Role
We're hiring a founding Support & AI Operations Lead to design how Backpack supports its customers and partners - and to build the AI and operational infrastructure that makes that support world-class without scaling headcount linearly with volume.
This role exists because we believe the next generation of customer experience won't be defined by ticket queues and SLAs alone. It will be defined by the quality of the AI agents, retrieval systems, knowledge bases, and automation layers sitting underneath the human team. We want someone who treats the support function as a product to be built, instrumented, and continuously improved - not a cost center to be staffed.
Our customers are student families, external payers, bursar offices and foundation program officers. They've been burned by clunky legacy vendors and they measure us on responsiveness, accuracy, and trust. How they experience Backpack _is_, in large part, the product.
Importantly, you will own the support interactions for the first ~12 months; in the trenches answering inbound questions until you are able to automate them away. That should be a challenge that excites you.
What you'll own
- The AI and automation stack. This is the heart of the role. You'll evaluate, deploy, and continuously tune the AI agents, retrieval pipelines, ticket-routing logic, and analytics that let Backpack deliver enterprise-grade support with a lean team. You'll own vendor selection, prompts and evals, guardrails, integrations with our ticketing and CRM systems, and the data pipeline that powers all of it.
- The support ecosystem. Channels, SLAs, tiering, escalation paths, on-call rotations, and how support feeds back into product and engineering. You decide what gets built, what gets bought, and what gets automated.
- The knowledge base. Internal runbooks and external documentation for both providers and universities. You own freshness, findability, and the editorial standard - and you build it as the foundation that the AI layer retrieves against.
- The voice of the customer. Synthesize what you're hearing into actionable signal for product, engineering, and GTM. Run the feedback loop that turns recurring tickets into roadmap items and recurring questions into self-serve content.
- Hiring and scaling the team. As volume grows, you'll build a small team underneath you - likely a mix of human CX specialists and AI/automation-savvy operators. The whole point, though, is to automate as much as possible - your success is measured in how small - not big - the team becomes.
What we're looking for
- 5+ years in customer experience, support operations, CX engineering, or a closely related function, with meaningful time in fintech, payments, B2B SaaS, or another high-trust environment.
- A track record of building, not just running. You've stood up a support function, a knowledge base, an AI deployment, or a CX tooling stack from scratch — and you can speak credibly to what worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently.
- Real fluency with the modern AI/CX stack. You don't need to write production code, but you should be comfortable evaluating LLM-powered support tools, designing prompts and evals, integrating systems via API, and reasoning rigorously about what to automate versus where humans must stay in the loop.
- Strong systems thinking. You instinctively look for the root cause, the leaky process, the missing piece of documentation — not just the ticket in front of you.
- Excellent written and verbal communication. You'll be talking to university CFOs and foundation directors as often as you'll be debugging an integration.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and a small team. We don't have a CX playbook yet. You're going to write it.
Bonus points
- Experience in higher-ed adjacent industries (student financial services, ed-tech, university operations).
- Experience supporting payments products specifically - ACH, wires, reconciliation, payment exceptions.
- Background in implementation or onboarding, not just reactive support.
- Experience deploying and tuning AI agents in a production support environment (Intercom Fin, Lorikeet, Decagon, Sierra, Ada, or comparable).
Compensation and Benefits
Salary
The salary range for this role is $110,000 - $160,000
Equity
Competitive equity package
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision health care plans
- Health care FSA/HSA plans
- 401K
- PTO and 10+ public holidays
- Backpack Recharges — dedicated team time off to recharge
Location
Austin, TX. In-office 3+ days (hybrid).
We look forward to hearing from you!
We cannot wait to hear from passionate, driven and talented people that are excited about our mission. We are building a first of its kind fintech company to completely revolutionize an entire asset class and, eventually, how all Americans pay for their education. We acknowledge that this is a big ask list so even if there are a couple of missing pieces, we strongly urge you to still apply.