Customer Operations Lead at Bastion

ABOUT BASTION Bastion builds regulated financial infrastructure for modern businesses. Bastion's full stack product suite covers stablecoin issuance, custodial wallet infrastructure, and global asset conversion rails, with the flexibility to deploy individual capabilities or combine them end-to-end. Bastion's regulated foundation underpins a compliance-first approach to risk management, ensuring the integrity and security of all financial activity within its systems. Bastion holds the appropriate licenses for its own operations, but can also act as a service provider, offering compliance and financial operations support under our customers’ licenses. OVERVIEW We're hiring a Customer Operations Lead to be the front line of support for Bastion's partners — starting with our highest-profile integration. You will be the person responding to partner escalations every day, triaging technical issues, and working directly with engineering, product, finops, and compliance to resolve them. You'll also build the processes, knowledge base, and tooling that make all of that sustainable and scalable. This isn't a "build the playbook and hand it off" role. You'll be doing the work — fielding partner inquiries, managing escalation workflows, and holding the line on what's in scope and what isn't. As volume grows, you'll design and manage the BPO strategy to scale support beyond yourself, but you need to be the kind of person who earns the right to delegate by doing the work first. We also want someone who thinks doing the same task manually for the tenth time is a waste of everyone's time. A core part of this role is selecting, implementing, and optimizing AI-powered support tools — knowledge bases that feed AI agents, automated triage that routes issues before a human touches them, and tooling that lets you deliver white-glove service at scale without scaling headcount linearly. You don't need to build these tools from scratch — you need to be the person who picks the right ones, gets them implemented correctly, and continuously tunes them so they actually work. If you have experience with automation workflows, AI tooling, or working with tools like Claude Code, that's a strong plus. The key skill is judgment: knowing where automation belongs and where a human touch is non-negotiable. You'll work cross-functionally from day one — closely with engineering on technical escalations, with product on documentation and knowledge management, and with compliance on regulatory workflows. Success in this role means our partners experience fast, accurate, and consistent support, and that you've built the operational infrastructure to maintain that quality as we scale. This role is based in New York City in a flexible hybrid-work environment. WORK TO BE DONE Instead of a list of requirements, we want to give you a directional look into the first 30, 90, and 180 days on the job. We are a startup, so the pace is fast and the specific work will change. People who thrive here are finding ways to contribute in their first week, and fully productive in their third month. You need to be okay with that. If you think this is something you can handle, we will be excited to speak with you. FIRST 30 DAYS: LEARN THE PRODUCT AND START HANDLING SUPPORT - Get hands-on with Bastion's platform — understand the product deeply enough to diagnose and triage partner issues without relying on engineering or product for every question - Begin handling partner escalations directly, working alongside the team members currently managing support to absorb context and build relationships with partner support teams - Audit the current state of support: what's documented, what's not, where issues get stuck, what patterns emerge in escalations, and where the boundary between Bastion's scope and partner scope is unclear - Evaluate and recommend ticketing and knowledge management systems — with a strong bias toward AI-first platforms that can learn from your knowledge base and automate Tier 0 triage over time - Outcomes - You are fielding partner escalations and resolving straightforward issues independently - A clear map of recurring issue types, average resolution paths, and scope boundary gaps - A recommendation on tooling with a rationale tied to Bastion's scale and AI strategy BY 90 DAYS: OWN THE SUPPORT FUNCTION AND BUILD THE OPERATING SYSTEM - You are the primary point of contact for partner support, handling escalations end-to-end and routing to other teams only when genuinely necessary - Build and ship a decision framework that clearly defines what's in Bastion's scope vs. partner scope — and use it to hold partner teams accountable to appropriate escalation behavior - Stand up the knowledge base: document resolution paths for the top issue types, create internal troubleshooting guides, and structure all of it so it feeds directly into the AI-powered support tools you're implementing — the quality of AI-assisted support is directly a function of how well this knowledge base is built - Identify which escalation patterns are automatable and begin deploying AI-assisted triage using the tools you've selected — your goal is to stop doing manually what a well-configured system could handle, so you can spend your time on the issues that actually require human judgment - Establish SLA tracking and reporting — measure first response time, resolution time, and escalation rates, and use data to identify where the process breaks - Partner with product and engineering to formalize the escalation path for technical issues, reducing back-and-forth and improving resolution speed - Outcomes - Partners experience consistent, timely support with clear SLAs being met - A functioning knowledge base that reduces repeat escalations and enables AI-assisted triage - The scope boundary framework is documented, socialized with partners, and actively enforced BY 180 DAYS: SCALE SUPPORT BEYOND YOURSELF - Design and begin executing a BPO strategy — identify, evaluate, and onboard an outsourced support partner to handle Tier 1 volume, with you managing quality, training, and escalation protocols - Train the BPO team (or partner support staff) using the knowledge base and decision frameworks you've built — you're the person who sets the standard and ensures it's maintained - Expand support coverage and capacity to meet contractual SLA requirements across time zones, including planning for non-US business hours - Build a voice-of-customer feedback loop that routes product insights, documentation gaps, and recurring pain points to product and engineering in a structured, actionable format - Measure and optimize the balance between AI-automated resolution and human-handled support — your north star is white-glove quality at scale, not just deflection rate - Outcomes - Support volume is shared between AI-powered automation, a BPO partner, and your direct handling of complex escalations — each layer doing what it's best at - SLAs are consistently met across all coverage windows - Product and engineering teams cite your feedback loop as a meaningful input to their prioritization SOME CHALLENGES YOU MIGHT TACKLE - Managing an evolving escalation dynamic: Your partner's support teams may escalate everything — including issues that are clearly outside Bastion's scope. You'll need to build the framework and the relationship to push back constructively while maintaining a strong partnership - Building a knowledge base in a fast-moving product environment: The product is evolving quickly, and documentation will be a moving target. You'll need to create systems that stay current and are structured well enough to power AI-assisted support - Bridging the gap between support and engineering: Technical escalations need to be crisp and well-documented so engineering can resolve them quickly. You'll design the handoff process and hold both sides to it - Balancing automation and white-glove service: Many partner escalations will be routine — the same issue types, the same scope misunderstandings, the same questions you've already documented. The right response is asking "why is a human still doing this?" and building the AI-powered layer that resolves it automatically next time. But you also need the judgment to know which interactions demand a human touch — the ones where nuance, relationship, and context matter more than speed - Navigating financial services regulatory requirements: Some customer issues will touch on regulatory frameworks specific to payments and digital assets. You don't need to be a regulatory expert on day one, but you'll need to learn quickly and know when to loop in compliance Bastion provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, and placement. 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