Customer Support Lead

Ficus Platforms; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Ficus is building modern payout infrastructure for life insurance carriers and is hiring a Customer Support Lead to build the function from the ground up. You will help customers access value through phone, text, email, messaging, and chat, while delivering compliant, high-quality service in a highly regulated industry.

The role is hands-on and player-coach, requiring collaboration, operational excellence, and the drive to scale a startup’s support function in a regulated fintech environment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building, managing, or scaling a customer support team.
• Experience in banking, financial services or fintech.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead Customer Support projects and initiatives with a balance of customer experience and efficiency.
• Guide and mentor internal and external support staff.
• Support and develop internal team members and external partners to succeed.
• Forecast support volume and plan staffing to maintain service levels as the business grows.
• Help select and onboard an outsourced support partner.
• Conduct regular quality reviews across teams to ensure timely, accurate support.
• Remain hands-on handling high volume inquiries via phone, text, chat, and email.
• Identify opportunities to improve end-to-end customer experience across Ficus.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Customer-first

Analytical skills

Independence

Problem solving

Ambiguity handling

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

About Ficus

Ficus is building modern payout infrastructure for life insurance carriers.

Today, when someone loses a loved one, the financial experience that follows is often slow, confusing, and outdated. Beneficiaries may receive paper checks, unclear instructions, fragmented communications, and limited flexibility in how they access funds. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with legacy banking integrations, manual workflows, compliance constraints, and outdated retained asset account infrastructure.

We are building the platform that helps insurers deliver a dramatically better beneficiary payout experience — including retained asset accounts, debit card access, checks, digital onboarding, beneficiary communications, and modern money movement through partner banks.

This is a large, overlooked, regulated market with real customer pain, real enterprise demand, and the opportunity to become core infrastructure for how insurance benefits are paid out.

We have raised from Founder Collective and BTV, and have signed a contract with one of the largest life insurance carriers in the United States. We are looking for highly driven, AI-pilled engineers to join us on this mission and be a core part of our founding team.

Our Team

Daniel Nissenbaum (CEO): Daniel was previously co-founder and CTO of Alinea, a Series A consumer investing app for Gen Z, which he helped scale to over 2M+ users and a $20M run rate. Before Alinea, he was a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase.

Terry Angelos (Co-founder): Terry is a lifelong fintech entrepreneur. He founded Trialpay which was acquired by Visa. He then stayed on to lead Visa’s strategy across fintech partnerships and digital assets as the Head of Fintech and Crypto. Terry was also formerly CEO of DriveWealth, a Series D brokerage infrastructure platform powering investing experiences for fintechs around the world.

About the Role

Ficus is hiring a Customer Support Lead to build and shape our customer support function from the ground up.

Our Customer Support team helps customers get the most value from Ficus by delivering thoughtful, responsive support across phone, text, email, messaging, and chat.

The ideal candidate brings experience in financial services and contact center operations, with a strong understanding of what it takes to deliver exceptional service in a highly regulated industry. This is a hands‑on, player‑coach role for someone who is collaborative, action‑oriented, and excited to build in a fast-moving startup environment.

You’ll set the standard for excellent customer service while developing the processes, tools, and practices that will help the support function scale. Responsibilities include:

What You’ll Do

• Lead Customer Support team projects and initiatives in a collaborative manner, equally balancing the customer experience with efficiency opportunities.

• Provide guidance and leadership to team members, assisting in managing both internal and external support staff.

• Support and develop both internal team members and external support partners, setting clear expectations and helping them succeed.

• Forecast support volume and evaluate staffing needs to ensure the team can maintain strong service levels as the business grows.

• Help select and onboard an outsourced support partner

• Conduct regular quality reviews across internal and external support teams to ensure customers receive accurate, timely, and thoughtful support that aligns with Ficus standards.

• Remain hands‑on by responding to a high volume of customer and prospect inquiries across phone, text, chat, messaging, and email.

• Identify opportunities to improve the end-to-end customer experience and partners across Ficus to prioritize and implement solutions.

• Set the standard for thoughtful problem‑solving by listening carefully, taking ownership, thoroughly evaluating issues, and guiding them through resolution.

• Manage complaints in accordance with company policies and regulatory requirements, working toward fair resolutions while preventing unnecessary escalation.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience, including 3+ years of experience building, managing, or scaling a customer support team.

• Experience in banking, financial services, fintech, or an early‑stage startup is strongly preferred.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• A thoughtful, customer‑first approach and a positive, collaborative, and inclusive working style.

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, supporting multiple products, and working across different systems in a fast‑moving startup.

• Strong analytical skills, with experience using Google Workspace or Microsoft Office, CRM platforms, and other tools to track and improve team performance.

• Excited to learn, take on new challenges, and solve problems without a predefined playbook.

• Passionate about building a strong team culture and creating a positive employee experience.

• Experience developing and owning customer support training and onboarding programs.

• Strong organizational and time‑management skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities.

• Self‑directed and comfortable working independently with minimal oversight.

• Highly motivated to make a meaningful impact and help shape how Ficus serves its customers.

• Willing and able to work flexible hours when customer or business needs require it.

Why Join

Ficus is taking on a $30B legacy monopoly in one of the most overlooked corners of financial infrastructure: how life insurance benefits are paid out.

This is a massive, under‑modernized market with real enterprise demand, entrenched incumbents, and a clear opportunity to build a category‑defining company. The work is both technically deep and deeply human: modernizing the infrastructure behind one of the most important financial moments in a person’s life.

You’ll be joining a seasoned fintech founding team with the scar tissue to know what matters: how to ship quickly, sell into regulated enterprises, navigate financial infrastructure, and build products people actually trust.

As one of the first engineers, you’ll have real ownership from day one across product, architecture, customer implementation, engineering culture, and hiring. And if you have aspirations to be a fintech founder one day, this is the kind of role where you will get a front‑row seat to the full company‑building journey: from product and infrastructure to enterprise sales, compliance, partnerships, and go‑to‑market.

You will not just be building features — you will be helping define the foundation of the company