Support Systems Engineer

LIGHT LABS

Powering a healthier food system through data, transparency, and accountability.

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Support Systems Engineer

Light Labs | Austin, TX (In-office)

The Opportunity

Are you the person who can't use a broken system without wanting to rebuild it? Who opens a messy inbox and sees the routing rules, the escalation path, and the three things AI should be answering instead of a person? Then you'd be a great fit as our Support Systems Engineer.

We have that inbox. Brands trust us with their test results, and when they have a question, they should get an answer before they've finished wondering. Right now they don't. Resolution time is the biggest problem in our support, and everything else about the customer experience waits on it. We have the tool to fix that. We don't have the system.

Our lab returns results in about three days, where the industry takes seven to fourteen. Support should feel even faster, and in a category where support is universally bad, being great is a real advantage. The target is two-minute resolution. You'd build what gets us there. That's the role.

What You'll Own

You'll own the system that every support request runs through, from the first message to the last escalation.

• Tell us what's broken. Walk in, audit how support works today, and say it plainly. Tickets get missed, and the same person gets pinged three times about one issue. You'll find the rest.

• Stand up Pylon. We've picked the tool. Nobody has had the time to build it out. Routing, tracking, ownership, and reporting are yours to design.

• Build escalation paths that actually work. Every ticket has an owner, a next step, and a clear route to the lab or engineering when it needs one.

• Put AI on the front line. Build the AI answers that handle the common questions, so people spend their time on the hard ones.

• Chase two minutes. Resolution time is your number. Measure it, move it, and report it.

• Make the team faster without making it bigger. Four virtual assistants run support day to day. Build systems they can run without you standing behind them.

• Give sales a story no lab can tell. The support numbers you produce go straight into sales calls.

• Free the account executives to go deep. When support and AI handle the smaller accounts, AEs can grow 20 to 30 large accounts instead of carrying a book of 150 that isn't growing.

• Pull in engineering when you need it. Our product manager will assign an engineer to your work. You decide what gets built.

• Build the playbook, not just the fix. Whatever you set up has to hold when volume is five times what it is today.

You'll report to AJ Mares, who runs GTM Operations, and work directly with our product manager and both co‑founders. This is a builder role, not a queue role.

What You'll Need

• You've built a ticketing system and run it under real volume. Support, sales, or GTM, any part of the business counts. You took a pile of inbound requests, organized them, and built the escalation paths. Built it, not just worked tickets inside it.

• You use AI to run your own work, not just to draft emails. You take something messy, feed it to AI, and turn it into something people can use. We'll ask you to show us how you do it.

• You’ve seen great support from the inside. You don't need to have run a support team. You need to know what good looks like well enough to bring us there.

• You'll say what's broken, out loud, and then fix it. "It works" isn't the bar. You ask whether it's the fastest, simplest way, and you change it when it isn't.

• You're comfortable starting with a problem instead of a project plan. There's a clear goal and a messy path. You figure out the next step without waiting to be told.

• You bring people along. The support team, the account executives, and the lab will all work differently because of what you build. You explain the why so the change sticks.

• Ready to be in our Austin office. This is in-office, not remote.

Stronger still: hands‑on time designing or building in Pylon, or building in Zendesk, Intercom, Front, HubSpot Service Hub, or Jira Service Management; a background in GTM engineering, support operations, CX operations, or RevOps; being the person your team already calls when they want to use AI for something; and time at a startup where you built the system instead of inheriting one.

Who We Are

Light Labs is building the modern platform for lab testing, starting with consumer goods brands: cheaper, faster testing that also automates regulatory compliance and drives revenue.

Consumers deserve to know what's actually in the products that affect their families' health, and transparency is what creates that informed customer. Beyond a faster, cheaper lab, we're building the infrastructure for brands to push lab data straight to their product pages (what's in it, what's not, claims verified) and automatically comply with regulations like Prop 65, CA AB 899, and Amazon's testing requirements.

That full loop, testing through customer-facing data, lets brands differentiate themselves and become the obvious choice in their category.

We're backed by top VCs, with CPG founders and strategics in the round. Everyone here, lab tech to engineer to sales, has a seat at the table in making the food system more transparent.

Our Mission

Everything we consume is getting more toxic and less nutritious, and the problem is invisible — you can't see, taste, or smell it:

• Cinnamon apple puree pouches, marketed for children and labeled preservative‑free, kosher, and gluten‑free, contained lead levels 200 times greater than the FDA's proposed guidelines.

• Over 1,300 chemicals are banned in cosmetics in the EU, while only 11 are banned in the United States.

• The US allows thousands of food additives that are banned in other countries.

• A study of 168 baby foods found that 95% contained at least one heavy metal (arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium), with a quarter containing all four.

• Seven out of eight samples of kale tested contained disturbing levels of PFAs, with organic kale containing even higher levels of the toxic compounds.

Testing for purity today is slow, expensive, and nearly impossible to interpret without a PhD. No feedback loop means no pressure to change, but if people knew what was actually in their food, they'd shop differently. That's our mission: real transparency, and it starts with every brand getting a straight answer the moment it asks for one.

Founding Team

• Nick Mares , 2x founder (Kettle & Fire, a $100M/year brand, and Upside Financing, exited 2022), $60M+ raised, CEO and COO experience, Thiel Fellow.

• Vijay Manohar , helped scale Samsara to $1B ARR and IPO (NYSE: IOT). B.S. computer engineering, UT Austin.

Values We're Looking For

• First Principles. We're looking for team members who can deal with ambiguity, deconstruct problems, and build the optimal solution. Question every requirement, delete any part or process you can, simplify and optimize, accelerate cycle time, automate. In support, that means fixing the system before adding a person.

• Standard of Excellence. High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent. There's a glut of mediocrity in the world. We're chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.

• Bias for Action. Take initiative, make decisions quickly, and have a willingness to experiment and learn from failures. Customer expectations aren't static, they rise over time, which means we have to continuously improve every single day.

• Low Ego. Coachability: it's not about being right, it's about getting to the right answer. React calmly to criticism or negative feedback, treat feedback as an opportunity for information and improvement. Respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when it's uncomfortable, and once a decision is made, commit wholly and move forward.

Why This Role

Most support jobs are just managing the queue: the same questions, the same copy‑paste answers, the same workarounds, one ticket after another, every day. Or supervising the people stuck in it. This one is designing how support works. The tool is picked, the goal is set, and the founders want it done. What's missing is the person who makes it real.

If you're the one your team already calls when something needs fixing with AI, and you'd rather build a system than babysit one, come build ours.

Light Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.

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