Lead, Support Operations

Shopify; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Shopify seeks a Support Operations Lead who thinks in systems, identifies root causes, and guides through influence. You’ll own operational processes, systems, and intelligence for Support Operations, diagnosing issues and building scalable solutions with automation and AI.

You will help thousands of Support Advisors improve outcomes and merchant experiences, tackling big problems with cross-functional collaboration across Operations, Data, Product, and Delivery.

Qualifications

• 5+ years driving an operations or support function that included owning systems and processes end to end, not just coordinating them.
• Experience improving operations in a large, complex, global organization, ideally a support organization.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to optimize the whole system.

Responsibilities

• Understand before building. Run real discovery and find the root cause, not the symptom.
• Prioritize by impact on the merchant, the Support Advisor, or the business.
• Design processes that work, with clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and feedback loops.

Skills

Systems thinking

Root cause analysis

Process design

AI & automation

Cross-functional leadership

Data-driven problem solving

Stakeholder management

Support tooling familiarity

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

About the role

We're looking for a Support Operations Lead who thinks in systems, seeks to understand before building, and leads through influence. You'll own the operational processes, systems, and intelligence behind Support Operations. That means diagnosing root causes, redesigning processes to improve outcomes (not just efficiency), and using automation and AI with judgment to build scalable solutions.

You'll help thousands of Support Advisors do their best work while improving the experience for the merchants and partners they serve.

This is an individual contributor role. You won't manage people, but you will set the bar. You'll take on big, tricky problems, work with stakeholders at every level of the organization, and get hands-on to build the solution, not just recommend it.

Key responsibilities

• Understand before building. Run real discovery and find the root cause, not the symptom.
• Prioritize by impact on the merchant, the Support Advisor, or the business.
• Design processes that work, not just processes that exist. Build in clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and feedback loops. If a process doesn't improve outcomes, redesign it or retire it.
• Exercise judgment on when to automate and when not to. Automate stable, repeatable work, keep the calls that need human judgment, and never automate a broken process.
• Build reliable metrics and reporting. Turn one-off analyses into always-on reporting so leadership doesn't have to ask.
• Lead across teams. You'll work with Operations, Workforce Planning, Delivery, Product, Data teams. You'll ship operational improvements with people who don't report to you.
• Use AI with taste. Build, analyze, and communicate with AI tools, and make the output not feel AI-generated.
• Have a point of view, and make it visible. Bring an opinion to strategic discussions and surface problems and opportunities before you're asked. Communicate what you're building and the outcomes it drives so your impact is clear to teams and leadership.

What you bring

• 5+ years driving an operations or support function (Support Ops, RevOps, BizOps, or Product Ops) that included owning systems and processes end to end, not just coordinating them.
• Experience improving operations in a large, complex, global organization, ideally a support organization, where the number of stakeholders and the complexity of systems demand a mature operations model.
• Strong systems thinking. You anticipate second-order effects, constantly challenge the status quo, and optimize the whole system rather than one step at the expense of another.
• Experience with operational discovery, service design, and process mapping, including building processes with clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and feedback loops.
• Instinctive use of AI to create impact in your work, with a commitment to growing your AI proficiency as the tools evolve. You've built AI workflows, automations, or internal tools, and you know when automation adds value and when human judgment is still needed.
• Data-driven problem solving. You're comfortable in BigQuery, dashboards, and messy data, and you've built reporting systems that changed how a team operated.
• Proven cross-functional leadership, shipping change with teams that didn't report to you. You communicate clearly and manage change well, so teams know what's different and actually adopt it.
• Familiarity with support tooling, CRM, routing, automation, and Support Advisor workflows, and with merchant, partner, or customer-support environments.
• Comfort with ambiguity. There's no playbook, and taking initiative comes naturally.

What this role is (and isn’t)

• Building, not just tracking. You'll design and ship solutions, not only manage timelines and coordinate handoffs.
• Creating insight, not just reporting. Your analysis should change decisions, not only describe what happened.
• Redesigning, not just maintaining. You'll improve how systems work, not only keep them running.