Duffel→
Head of Technical Support at Duffel in London, United Kingdom
Job Description
📍 London (Hybrid — 2 days onsite)
🕒 Permanent | Start ASAP
We’re Making Travel Effortless. Join Us.
Travel is essential, whether it’s visiting family, starting a new adventure, or taking a career defining trip. Yet today, over 4 billion airline passengers rely on tech that hasn't changed in decades.
At Duffel, we’re rebuilding the infrastructure underpinning the global travel industry. Backed by top-tier investors (Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures, and Kima Ventures) and born out of Y Combinator (S18), we’re simplifying complex systems to build the future of travel
About the role
As Head of Technical Support, you’ll lead our team of Technical Support Engineers and take responsibility for the quality, effectiveness and development of the function.
You’ll build a team that combines strong technical investigation with clear, thoughtful customer communication. You’ll coach engineers, establish effective ways of working and ensure customers receive dependable support as their integrations grow in complexity and scale.
You’ll stay close to the work: reviewing investigations, helping with significant escalations and understanding where our products or processes create friction. Your impact will come from strengthening the whole team’s ability to resolve problems and turning what we learn from support into lasting improvements.
You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, Partner Engineering, Partner Management and Travel Operations. Technical Support owns day-to-day API questions, troubleshooting and the customer support response to technical incidents. Partner Engineers own strategic technical relationships and solution architecture; Implementation Managers own implementation programmes.
What you’ll do
Lead and develop the team. Set clear expectations, provide regular coaching and feedback, support career development and address performance issues constructively. Hire and onboard engineers as the team grows.
Own support quality. Establish standards for technical investigation, written communication, case ownership and follow-through. Ensure customers understand what is happening, what comes next and who is responsible.
Build a dependable support operation. Improve triage, prioritisation, queue management, handovers and escalation paths. Plan staffing and coverage around customer needs and agreed service commitments, with a sustainable workload for the team.
Strengthen technical capability. Help engineers investigate API behaviour, interpret logs and request traces, reproduce integration issues and distinguish customer configuration problems from platform or supplier issues.
Lead significant customer escalations. Coordinate the support response, establish customer impact and keep communication clear through to resolution. Work with Engineering on diagnosis and recovery, involving Partner Engineering where an issue creates a wider strategic risk.
Make collaboration effective. Give Engineering actionable escalation reports with evidence, reproduction steps and impact. Work with Travel Operations on booking and supplier issues, and with implementation teams to ensure new integrations enter support with the context the team needs.
Improve the product through support. Identify recurring problems and turn them into clear recommendations for Product and Engineering. Track whether fixes, documentation and product changes actually reduce customer friction.
Make support easier to deliver. Develop troubleshooting guides, internal knowledge, customer documentation and useful tooling. Apply automation and AI where they improve accuracy, speed and access to help.
Use evidence to guide decisions. Monitor response and resolution performance, ageing work, reopened cases, customer feedback and team capacity. Use that information to prioritise improvements and make clear recommendations about investment.
What we’re looking for
Experience managing and developing a technical support or support engineering team serving business customers.
A track record of improving both customer outcomes and how a support function operates.
Strong technical understanding of APIs, HTTP, authentication, webhooks and integrations, with enough practical depth to guide investigations and earn the trust of engineers.
Comfort working with logs, SQL and scripts to investigate problems or improve support workflows.
Experience handling consequential customer escalations, including situations where the cause or resolution is initially uncertain.
Ability to explain technical issues to developers, business stakeholders and senior leaders.
Sound judgement about urgency, customer impact and competing priorities.
Evidence of effective hiring, coaching, performance management and delegation.
The ability to influence Product, Engineering and commercial teams through clear reasoning and useful evidence.
Comfort building and improving a function in a growing company, while remaining involved in its day-to-day work.
Experience that would be useful
Supporting an API platform, developer product or infrastructure business.
Working with enterprise customers running important production integrations.
Leading support across different time zones.
Improving support tooling, knowledge management, self-service or automation.
Experience in travel technology, payments or another industry with complex external dependencies.
You don’t need to have worked in travel or held this exact title. We’re interested in the teams you’ve developed, the problems you’ve solved and the judgement you bring.
What success looks like
During your first six months:
Engineers have clear expectations, regular coaching and practical development plans.
Customer issues have clear ownership, appropriate prioritisation and dependable communication.
You have established a trustworthy baseline for support performance and delivered measurable improvements in the most important areas.
Escalations reach the right teams with better evidence and fewer unnecessary handovers.
Recurring problems are being addressed through product changes, documentation or tooling.
Duffel has a clear plan for the support capacity and capabilities needed as the business grows.
Why Join Duffel?
We’re a growth-focused team that values open communication, diverse perspectives, and true ownership. We want you to feel empowered in your role, which is why every permanent employee becomes a company shareholder.
🌍 Live Your Best Life
Duffel Travel Allowance: We subsidise your wanderlust.
Work From Anywhere (60 days): Your office, your rules.
Sabbaticals: Long-term loyalty, long-term breaks.
Flexible Bank Holidays: Swap holidays to suit your schedule.
🔋 Level Up & Give Back
Study Days: Get paid to learn.
Volunteering Day: One day a year to save the world.
Electric Car & Cycle Schemes: Eco-friendly rides, tax-free prices.
🛡️ The Essentials, Upgraded
Family Leave (maternity, paternity and adoption): Big support for life’s biggest moments, 26 weeks fully paid.
Pensions & Loans: Future-proofing and interest-free commuting.
Eye Tests: Keeping your vision (and your style) sharp.