OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used for customer screening, legal compliance and in-depth investigative analysis.

We take pride in providing a high quality dataset to the public and to our subscribers. Based on an open source data pipeline and providing public search for everybody, we bring transparency and a commitment to accessibility and openness to the industry.

What’s the role?

We’re looking for a technical support manager. You will work with our prospective and existing customers to help them make the most of our database and API service. This includes answering questions about the meaning of the data, as well as talking through the technical steps our customers need to take to get up and running. In particular, you’ll be helping people to deploy our on-premises solution, and make sure that the API gives them reliable and valid answers, as well as that they fully understand the rich structure of our dataset. You will play a strategic role in collecting and prioritising customer needs, and creating documentation that makes our product even easier to adopt.

You will work with the technology folk within fintech, investigations and financial services companies, and also the people in compliance departments that define how our data and services can help reduce their financial crime exposure. We want you to translate our method - working transparently, speaking in plain facts and avoiding hyperbole - into a support philosophy.

What’s involved in this?

• Customer support - help existing customers that have questions about the product, whether it is deeply technical or related to sanctions list sources.
• Documentation - for recurring questions, make sure we end up with a well-written piece of technical docs for the next time.
• Sales engineering - help prospective customers to get up and running by developing an understanding of their use case and then putting our products to work.
• Product roadmap - work with our engineers to collect defects, feature ideas and non-intuitive experiences, then communicate with customers when these have been addressed.
• Support infrastructure - lead the effort to set up a proper help desk with issue management that doesn’t alienate customers.

Ideal Qualifications

The ideal candidate will be able to step easily between the worlds of engineering and business and be able to translate between the two.

• Communications skills - both in technical and domain knowledge communications - will be a major advantage. Written English at a C2 or better level is required.
• Previous experience in a support or customer success role would be excellent.
• You’re keen to develop a technical understanding of the following concepts (and curiosity to learn more!):
  • REST APIs and how HTTP interfaces work.
  • Data engineering, and some understanding of data best practices.
  • Docker containers, perhaps even some experience with Kubernetes.
  • Fuzzy matching techniques and entity matching strategies.
  • Understanding some of the policy implications of international sanctions.
• An organized mindset is crucial - you’ll be working with dozens of customers, so being able to keep them all in mind and work well with them is essential. Familiarity with writing trouble tickets and maintaining a current state of open and closed tickets is essential.
• Willingness to engage with customers in non-European time zones and accept occasional meetings in the early morning or in the evening.

The deal:

• This can be a part-time position, e.g. 50% or 80%.