Head of Customer Operations at Bastion in New York City, NY

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 looking for a Head of Customer Operations to build and lead customer support across Bastion's partner ecosystem. Our partners include some of the largest consumer technology and financial services companies in the world, each with millions of end users. When those users have issues with Bastion-powered features, the support experience needs to be fast, accurate, and scalable. You're the person responsible for making that happen. This role sits at the intersection of partner operations, support strategy, and AI-powered tooling. You'll define what Bastion's support obligations look like across each partnership, design the support model, and own the operational infrastructure that holds it all together. Early on, you'll be hands-on: fielding partner escalations, learning the product deeply, and building the documentation and frameworks that everything else depends on. The reason we need a leader is that the scale and complexity of what's coming requires someone who has operated support at volume, managed outsourced teams, selected and implemented AI-powered CX tooling, and seen support models with different structures and expectations. While we have a preference for the role to be based in NYC, we are open to candidates working remotely throughout the US. 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, UNDERSTAND THE PARTNER LANDSCAPE, 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 others for every question - Begin handling partner escalations directly, working alongside team members currently managing support to absorb context and build relationships with partner 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 - Review Bastion's contractual support obligations (MSAs, SLAs) across existing partnerships to understand what we're committed to and where there are gaps - Evaluate the support tooling landscape — with a strong bias toward AI-first platforms that can learn from your knowledge base and automate Tier 0/Tier 1 triage over time - Outcomes - You are fielding partner escalations and resolving straightforward issues independently - A clear map of recurring issue types, resolution paths, scope boundary gaps, and volume patterns - An initial assessment of support capacity needs based on current and projected partner volume 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 engineering and product only when genuinely necessary - Build and ship the scope boundary framework — a clear, documented decision model that defines what's in Bastion's scope vs. partner scope for each partnership, 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 for both human and AI consumption - Establish SLA tracking and reporting — measure first response time, resolution time, and escalation rates, and use data to identify where the process breaks - Outcomes - Partners experience consistent, timely support with clear SLAs being met - A functioning knowledge base that reduces repeat escalations and enables AI-assisted triage BY 180 DAYS: SCALE SUPPORT ACROSS PARTNERSHIPS - Design and execute the BPO strategy — identify, evaluate, and onboard an outsourced support partner to handle Tier 1 volume, with you managing quality, training, and escalation protocols - Build the support model for Bastion's next major partnership launch — you'll need to define support scope, capacity plan for projected volume, train the partner's support team, and ensure Bastion's infrastructure is ready before go-live - Optimize the balance between AI-automated resolution and human-handled support — your north star is white-glove quality at scale, not just deflection rate - 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 - Outcomes - Support volume is distributed across 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 and partnerships - A repeatable playbook exists for onboarding new partners into Bastion's support model - Product and engineering teams cite your feedback loop as a meaningful input to their prioritization SOME CHALLENGES YOU MIGHT TACKLE - Designing support across partners with very different structures: One partner runs a three-tier escalation model who communicate only via email. Another might have a dedicated integration team on Slack. You'll need to build a support framework flexible enough to work across both, while keeping Bastion's internal operations coherent - Capacity planning when volume is unknown: Partners often can't estimate ticket volume for new financial product features. You'll need to build volume projections using product data, industry benchmarks, and your own experience — then design a support model that can flex when reality differs from the forecast - Balancing automation and white-glove service: Many escalations will be routine — the same issue types, the same scope misunderstandings, the same questions you've already documented. The right response isn't just patience; it's asking "why is a human still doing this?" and deploying AI-powered tooling that resolves it next time. But you also need the judgment to know which interactions demand a human touch - Building documentation that scales across audiences: The error code mappings, CS case taxonomies, and knowledge base content you create will be consumed by customer support team, a BPO vendor, an AI agent, and Bastion's internal team. Each audience has different needs, and the documentation needs to work for all of them - 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. Bastion participates in E-Verify to authorize eligibility of employment in the United States.