Customer Support Lead

About Ficus

Ficus is building modern payout infrastructure for life insurance carriers.

Today, when someone loses a loved one, the financial experience that follows is often slow, confusing, and outdated. Beneficiaries may receive paper checks, unclear instructions, fragmented communications, and limited flexibility in how they access funds. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with legacy banking integrations, manual workflows, compliance constraints, and outdated retained asset account infrastructure.

We are building the platform that helps insurers deliver a dramatically better beneficiary payout experience — including retained asset accounts, debit card access, checks, digital onboarding, beneficiary communications, and modern money movement through partner banks.

This is a large, overlooked, regulated market with real customer pain, real enterprise demand, and the opportunity to become core infrastructure for how insurance benefits are paid out.

We have raised from Founder Collective and BTV, and have signed a contract with one of the largest life insurance carriers in the United States. We are looking for highly driven, AI-pilled engineers to join us on this mission and be a core part of our founding team.

Our Team

Daniel Nissenbaum (CEO): Daniel was previously co-founder and CTO of Alinea, a Series A consumer investing app for Gen Z, which he helped scale to over 2M+ users and a $20M run rate. Before Alinea, he was a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase.

Terry Angelos (Co-founder): Terry is a lifelong fintech entrepreneur. He founded Trialpay which was acquired by Visa. He then stayed on to lead Visa's strategy across fintech partnerships and digital assets as the Head of Fintech and Crypto. Terry was also formerly CEO of DriveWealth, a Series D brokerage infrastructure platform powering investing experiences for fintechs around the world.

About the Role

We are hiring a Customer Support Lead to help build Ficus’s customer support function from the ground up. You will work directly with the founders to define what exceptional customer support looks like at Ficus: personally supporting customers across voice, text, email, messaging, and chat while building the processes, tools, training, and service standards needed to scale.

You will be the first customer support hire at the company, with meaningful ownership over the entire customer experience. You should be excited to stay close to customers, solve sensitive and complex problems, build new systems from scratch, and eventually hire and lead a broader support team. The ideal candidate brings experience in financial services and contact center operations and understands how to deliver empathetic, high-quality service in a heavily regulated industry.

What You’ll Do

• Lead Customer Support projects and initiatives, balancing an exceptional customer experience with opportunities to improve efficiency.

• Provide guidance, mentorship, and day-to-day leadership to both internal and external support team members.

• Conduct regular forecasting and resource assessments to ensure the team can support business growth while meeting established service levels.

• Help select and implement an outsourced support partner, eventually serving as the day-to-day liaison to its management team. This includes providing training, communicating key information, and acting as an escalation point for customer inquiries and complaints.

• Conduct quality reviews of internal and external support staff to ensure team members meet expectations for quality of care and provide accurate, timely information consistent with Ficus processes and service standards.

• Manage a high volume of inbound calls, texts, chats, messages, and emails from customers and prospective customers across all Ficus products and services.

• Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience from end to end and partner with other Ficus leaders to prioritize and implement improvements.

• Act as a leader and mentor to the broader support team. When resolving issues, use active listening and strong comprehension skills to take ownership, conduct a thorough evaluation, and guide the issue through resolution while setting the right example for the team.

• Manage complaints in accordance with company policies and compliance requirements, working toward positive resolutions for customers and prospective customers while preventing further escalation.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience, including 3+ years of experience managing a customer support team

• 3+ years of experience in banking and/or a startup environment preferred

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• A track record of delivering exceptional customer service and bringing a positive, inclusive, and collaborative attitude to your work

• Ability to thrive in a dynamic, complex startup environment while supporting multiple products and navigating a variety of systems and applications

• Strong analytical and presentation skills, with experience using Microsoft Office or G-Suite alongside CRM and other support tools to analyze and report on team performance

• Eagerness to learn, take on new challenges, and adapt as the company grows

• A passion for building a strong company culture and creating a positive employee experience

• Experience owning customer service training and ensuring new team members ramp successfully

• Strong organizational and time-management skills

• Ability to work independently with minimal direction or supervision

• A highly motivated, hands-on mindset and genuine interest in helping shape Ficus at an early stage

• Flexibility to work outside standard hours when needed

Why Join

Ficus is taking on a $30B legacy monopoly in one of the most overlooked corners of financial infrastructure: how life insurance benefits are paid out.

This is a massive, under-modernized market with real enterprise demand, entrenched incumbents, and a clear opportunity to build a category-defining company. The work is both technically deep and deeply human: modernizing the infrastructure behind one of the most important financial moments in a person’s life.

You’ll be joining a seasoned fintech founding team with the scar tissue to know what matters: how to ship quickly, sell into regulated enterprises, navigate financial infrastructure, and build products people actually trust.

You’ll be joining as Ficus’s first customer support hire, with meaningful ownership over the customer experience from day one. You’ll help define support processes, service standards, training programs, escalation workflows, and the systems needed to build a high-quality support function at scale. This is an opportunity to work closely with the founders, stay close to customers, and eventually hire and lead a broader support team while helping shape the culture and operating foundation of the company.

You will not just be answering customer questions - you will be helping define the foundation of the company