Senior Support Manager

Kalamuna; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 95,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid holidays

PTO

Bereavement leave

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Learning stipend

Travel stipend

Equipment fund

401k match

Flexible hours

Team events

Job summary

Kalamuna is seeking a Senior Support Manager to lead and evolve our client support practice, treating it as a product. You will scope work, run site audits, and coordinate SMEs to deliver high‑quality outcomes, while nurturing client relationships and driving growth.

Experience with Drupal/WordPress, Jira, and agile practices is valued. You will partner with the client relationship manager to identify opportunities, manage expectations, and guide teams through mid‑size projects, ensuring timely

Qualifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to build trust and manage client conversations.
• Identify opportunities for continuous improvement and proactively recommend ideas for clients.
• Strong critical thinking; prioritize and judge independently, knowing when to ask for input.
• Translate client requests into actionable development tickets.
• Work with development teams to confirm and revise estimates.
• Comfortable navigating Drupal and WordPress interfaces to troubleshoot and update content.
• Familiarity with core web technologies (PHP, HTML, CSS, JS).
• Experience with agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban.
• Familiarity with AI tools (Gemini, Claude) in workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and shape the support program with a product mindset.
• Onboard projects into the support practice and refine offerings.
• Collaborate on growth and renewals with the client relationship manager.
• Run support delivery; manage tickets in Jira and align with teams.
• Coordinate backlogs, QA steps, and implementation direction.
• Lead QA practices and continuous improvement in the support function.
• Provide technical direction and strategy for support and retainer projects.
• Support clients through proactive guidance and transparent communication.

Skills

Communication

Client needs assessment

Prioritization

Ticketing

Drupal/WordPress

Web technologies

Team collaboration

Agile methodologies

AI integration

Tools

Jira

Parallax

New Relic

Sentry

Git

Drupal

WordPress

Gemini

Claude

Job description

You are equal parts best pal and air traffic controller — and a builder at heart.

This role starts as a contract-to-hire engagement at 30 hours per week, with the goal of converting to a full-time employee role within 3–6 months as our support offerings grow.

The Senior Support Manager has a commitment to quality, timeliness, and personable communication, paired with the organizational discipline to keep many moving parts on track. But this is more than traffic control. You'll treat our support practice as a product: proactively shaping the offering, anticipating client priorities, and rallying the team to meet them. You'll scope and estimate work, run site audits, and coordinate the right SMEs to deliver — and if you're comfortable making content updates in Drupal and WordPress yourself, all the better.

The ideal person for this role genuinely enjoys building relationships. You know how to earn trust quickly, communicate with warmth and confidence, and help clients feel cared for without losing sight of deadlines, scope, or accountability. You can navigate difficult conversations with empathy, but you’re equally comfortable setting expectations and holding boundaries when needed.

We measure success by the value we create for our clients. That means advancing optimizations before anyone asks, catching bugs before they're reported, and offering strategic, growth‑minded advice that helps our client partners engage their audiences and change their corner of the world. You'll work hand in hand with our client relationship manager to grow accounts, win new support business, and renew the partnerships we already have. This role reports to our Director of Projects.

What you'll do

Build and shape the support program

• Bring a product mentality to support: rather than waiting for problems to arise, you will proactively analyze client situations, find the gaps, define the right support offering to close those gaps. The mission is to improve the client experience from one release to the next
• Onboard projects we deliver or inherit into our support practice.
• Help formulate new support offerings and and refine existing ones, and frame their value for prospective clients and the public.
• Develop and maintain internal documentation on support practices and resources, including Project Briefs.
• Look for opportunities to bring AI into the support program thoughtfully in ways that improve efficiency and effectiveness without sacrificing quality or trust.

Partner on growth and renewals

• Natural curiosity about client goals and a proven ability to identify client needs, connect them to potential solutions, and confidently participate in growth and renewal conversations.
• Work closely with our client relationship manager to identify, scope, and win new support work, drive renewals, and grow existing accounts.
• Generate ideas with the team to deepen and expand client relationships.
• Spot larger initiatives within support accounts and route them to the right people at the right time.

Run support delivery

• Act alongside account managers to keep client satisfaction high through responsive timelines and clear communication.
• Manage the flow and prioritization of support work in Jira, assigning and escalating tickets.
• Resource the team using Parallax and participate in our weekly project planning reviews
• Actively build and refine the support backlog with the teams and clients: detail requirements, define success, outline QA steps, and suggest implementation direction where it helps.
• Coordinate mini-sprints to optimize delivery for mid-size support clients.
• Run rotating audits on a monthly, quarterly, or semi‑annual cadence depending on service level.

Provide support leadership

• Stay up‑to‑date on major technical updates and changes across popular modules and libraries, and translate what they mean for our clients.
• Work with the team to provide technical direction and strategy for support and retainer projects, coordinating developers and SMEs to deliver the work.
• Oversee processes for timely security updates.
• Manage releases and oversee deployments in partnership with the development team.
• Lead continuous improvement of QA practices within support, aligned with agency best practices.

Support the team and clients

• Build trusted relationships with internal team members and clients through consistent communication, thoughtful follow‑up, and proactive guidance that helps them feel supported, not just serviced.
• Conduct trainings and produce client‑facing documentation.
• Work with project operations to secure enough development, strategy, and design capacity for support work.
• Coordinate on‑call providers outside our service hours so they operate independently while staying aligned with our culture of service and communication.

Qualifications

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build trust, manage expectations, and navigate challenging client conversations with professionalism and confidence.
• Demonstrated ability to identify opportunities for continuous improvement and proactively recommend ideas that help clients achieve their goals.
• Strong critical thinking skills, with the ability to make prioritization and judgment calls independently and know when to ask for input or help.
• Translate client requests into actionable development tickets.
• Work with development teams to confirm and revise estimates.
• Comfortable navigating Drupal and WordPress administrative interfaces to troubleshoot issues, perform minor content updates, and support clients directly when appropriate.
• Working familiarity with Drupal and WordPress — features, functionality, and common contributed modules — enough to scope work and troubleshoot.
• Familiarity with core web technologies (PHP, HTML, CSS, JS) — enough to communicate customer needs clearly to developers.
• Site health monitoring experience (e.g., New Relic, Sentry, Pingdom, or similar).
• Interest in Drupal/WordPress or other open‑source technologies and web best practices.
• Familiarity with collaborative development tools such as Git.
• Past web agency experience.
• Experience with agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban.
• Familiarity with UX design for the web.
• Knowledge of accessibility standards and best practices.
• Experience with AI tools such as Gemini and Claude in particular.

Bonus points

• Project management certifications such as Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), PMI‑ACP, Kanban Management Professional (KMP), Certified Product Owner (CSPO), or similar.
• Familiarity with analytics, accessibility, SEO, GEO, and UX best practices.
• Hands‑on Drupal (7–11) and/or WordPress development experience.
• Fluency with AI and experience incorporating it into existing workflows.
• Understanding of LAMP stack server architectures; AWS experience.
• DevOps and CI experience (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Experience with the Linux command line, including Drush.

Working with us

People are at the heart of everything we do.

Kalamuna is driven by a civic spirit to help socially impactful institutions, nonprofits, and governments better communicate with constituents and do right by the people they serve. We bring digital communications to life for organizations as varied as Fair Trade USA, the American Foundation for the Blind, the Environmental Defence Fund, the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Kalamuna's mission is to empower our clients with the research, strategy, design, and technology that will transform their organizations to better serve the needs of their audiences and communities. Kalamuna aligns itself in this manner to make each of our client's missions our mission. We seek to be impactful, not only for our clients and partners but for the social good of our communities.

Kalamuna offers many benefits, including paid holidays, PTO, paid bereavement leave, parental leave, including health insurance, long and short‑term disability, a continued learning & travel stipend, an equipment fund, and a 401(k) with 3% match. We offer flexibility in work hours and accommodations. When pandemic‑free, we organize company‑wide gatherings like team building workshops, conferencing, and additional fun.

We're looking for individuals with a broad range of interests and experiences to be their authentic selves. Your story, your passion is what interests us most. Meet some of our team at https://youtu.be/K1rtt6oKGEs.

Commitment to Diversity

Kalamuna is committed to eradicating institutional discrimination and bias and to uplifting the lived experiences of all underrepresented communities.

As such, Kalamuna welcomes applications from all backgrounds, particularly from people of color; women; LGBTQ2S+ people; immigrants or refugees; people who are differently‑abled; and people from low‑or moderate‑income backgrounds.

Kalamuna is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and does not discriminate in its employment decisions on the basis of race, creed, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, height, weight, disability status, veteran status, military obligations, marital status and policy party affiliation, or on any other basis that complies with applicable laws.