Director, Customer Experience Operations

Department: Customer Experience 

Reports to: EVP, Clinical Integrations & Customer Outcomes 

Location: Hybrid — Santa Barbara, CA HQ (regular on-site presence; open to candidates as far as the greater LA area) 

Salary Range: $150,000 – $170,000 Annual

Intake Breathing is a DTC health and wellness company helping people breathe better through our subscription-based nasal breathing device. Our customers don't just buy a product. They adopt a practice that transforms their sleep, recovery, and daily life. The post-sale experience is where that transformation either takes root or falls apart, which is why this role exists.

We're a focused team that believes great systems and thoughtful tooling are how modern companies deliver world-class customer experiences. Everyone here has real ownership, real scope, and the freedom to build.

We're hiring a Director of Customer Experience Operations to own and scale our Customer Care function through Intake's next phase of growth. This is a leadership role for an operator who's been close to a CX transformation at scale and is ready to run the whole function as their next step up.

You'll report directly to our EVP of Clinical Integrations & Customer Outcomes and own a clear mandate: turn post-sale customer interactions into the highest-leverage retention, revenue rescue, and brand-love engine in the business. You'll set the strategy, own the tooling decisions, build and develop the team, and define the operating standards for what a customer conversation at Intake looks like.

This is a director-level role with full functional ownership. You'll be accountable for outcomes, trusted to make the calls on how to get there, and expected to operate as a true department leader who partners with the rest of the executive team. For the right person, this is the role where you go from leading pieces of CX to owning all of it.

This is a hybrid role based out of our Santa Barbara headquarters. We're open to candidates as far as the greater Los Angeles area, with the expectation that you'll commute to Santa Barbara to be on-site with the team and cross-functional partners on a regular basis. Time on-site matters here: a meaningful share of how this role operates depends on being in the room with the team and the rest of leadership.

The strategy and the roadmap. You set the direction for CX Operations: where the function is going, what it will own, how it scales, and how it ties to company-level retention and revenue goals. You build the multi-quarter roadmap and you're accountable for delivering against it.

The systems and architecture. You'll design and continuously refine the technical backbone of customer experience: help desk configuration, routing logic, macros, knowledge bases, integrations between Shopify/Amazon/HubSpot and our support stack, customer data flows, and reporting. You see CX infrastructure as a product you ship to your team, and you iterate on it constantly.

The AI tooling layer. You're genuinely excited about where AI is going and you put it to work. You set the strategy for AI across the function and you prototype, evaluate, and deploy the tools yourself: agents, copilots, classification systems, voice-of-customer mining, automated response drafting. You believe great AI tooling is one of the most powerful ways to deliver exceptional customer experience at scale, and you'll be the person making that real here.

Voice of customer as a strategic asset. Every ticket, review, DM, and call contains signal. You'll build the systems that capture it, structure it, surface it, and route it to the people who can act on it: product, marketing, clinical, operations, leadership. At a company our size, the CX function is one of our most valuable listening posts, and you'll own making sure that signal actually moves the business.

Revenue rescue and retention. You own saved revenue and retained subscribers as core business metrics. You set the gold standard for the hard conversations (the churn risk, the refund request, the subscriber on the edge), you document what works, and you build the playbooks, training, and tooling that let the whole team operate at that level.

The team. You'll lead, grow, and develop our Customer Care team. You set the hiring bar, the performance standards, the career paths, and the culture. You're a player-coach who stays close to the queue, but you think in terms of scaling impact through both systems and people, and you build an organization, not just a roster.

Cross-functional leadership. You represent CX at the leadership table and partner directly with product, marketing, clinical, and operations. You bring customer insight into company strategy and you're a peer to the other functional leaders driving the business forward.

Process and optimization. You're relentless about this. Cycle times, first-contact resolution, CSAT, contact rate per subscriber, cost per contact, deflection rate, retention impact. You own the numbers, you report on them to leadership, and you move them every month.

• You've operated inside a high-growth consumer brand at meaningful scale ($50M ) and you've led real pieces of a CX transformation, owning systems, tooling, or team build-out. You're ready to run the whole function and this is your step up to doing it.
• A track record of building or improving a CX function rather than just running one someone else designed, ideally in DTC, subscription, or health/wellness
• Experience leading or developing people, with a real point of view on how to build a high-performing CX team
• Hands-on fluency with modern CX stacks (Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, Intercom, or similar) and e-commerce platforms (Shopify, Amazon Seller Central)
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI tooling. You can talk specifically about agents, prompts, evals, and where each fits in a CX workflow, and you've shipped real things, not just read about them
• Technical fluency to build, prototype, and automate (Lovable, Claude Code, no-code/low-code tools, API integrations, Zapier/Make, scripting a plus)
• Strong commercial instincts: you understand the unit economics of subscription retention and you can connect CX work to revenue and LTV
• Startup instincts: comfortable with ambiguity, fast decisions, and building things from scratch
• Strong opinions about what great post-sale customer experience feels like, and the writing and conversational skills to demonstrate it personally
• Based in or able to reliably commute to the Santa Barbara area; candidates across the greater Los Angeles region are welcome to apply
  

You'll have full ownership of a function at a company small enough that your work is visible and consequential every single day, with the scope and autonomy of a true department head. You'll take the systems thinking you've been building and apply it somewhere small enough that every improvement is visible the day you ship it. You'll work directly with senior leadership, including the EVP of Clinical Integrations & Customer Outcomes, who is genuinely engaged in the operational work. You'll sit inside a function that explicitly ties customer experience to clinical outcomes, which means your work compounds beyond support metrics into the real-world impact our product has on people's health. The systems and the team you build here will define how Intake scales, and they'll define your next chapter too.