About The Word.
The Word.™ is a community platform that brings residents, nonprofits, local businesses, schools, and community organizations together to strengthen their communities.
Unlike traditional social platforms centered around likes, followers, and attention, The Word. is designed around meaningful participation—helping people discover local organizations, events, volunteer opportunities, businesses, causes, and ways to make a difference.
The Word.™ — Where Good Takes Action.
The opportunity
The Word. is looking for a Technical Support Engineer to help ensure that our users, Community Ambassadors, nonprofits, businesses, schools, and community partners receive outstanding technical support.
This role sits at the intersection of customers, product, and engineering. You'll investigate technical problems, reproduce issues, identify potential root causes, resolve problems when possible, and provide engineering with the information needed to address issues that require code or infrastructure changes.
We're looking for someone who doesn't simply close support tickets. We're looking for someone who asks:
What you'll do
Troubleshoot technical issues
Investigate technical problems reported by users, Community Ambassadors, and partner organizations. Issues may involve:
- Account creation and authentication
- Login and account access
- Mobile application behavior
- Web application behavior
- Notifications
- Organization onboarding
- Content creation and posting
- Images and media
- Events and volunteer opportunities
- Business offers
- Location and address-related functionality
- Permissions and access
- Performance issues
- Data synchronization
- Unexpected application behavior
Reproduce & diagnose problems
Work to reproduce reported problems and determine whether an issue is caused by user configuration, application behavior, backend services, third-party services, or a software defect.
Capture the information engineering needs to investigate effectively, including reproduction steps, screenshots, logs, device information, application versions, expected behavior, and actual behavior.
Resolve issues
Resolve technical problems directly when possible. Provide users and internal team members with clear instructions that help them understand what happened and what they need to do next.
Escalate engineering issues
Identify problems that require engineering involvement and escalate them with clear technical documentation. A good escalation should allow an engineer to quickly understand:
- What happened?
- Who is affected?
- How can we reproduce it?
- What was expected to happen?
- What actually happened?
- How severe is the impact?
Support Community Ambassadors
Community Ambassadors serve as the primary relationship contact for many organizations using The Word. The Technical Support Engineer will provide the next level of technical assistance when Ambassadors encounter problems they cannot resolve themselves.
This allows Ambassadors to remain focused on relationships and community engagement while Technical Support handles deeper technical investigation.
Monitor application health
Help identify patterns that may indicate broader platform problems. A single report may be an isolated issue. Multiple reports involving the same functionality may indicate something more significant.
The Technical Support Engineer should recognize these patterns and raise them quickly.
Work with engineering
Partner closely with The Word. engineering team to investigate defects, verify fixes, test solutions, and communicate technical issues. When appropriate, help validate fixes before issues are considered resolved.
Document solutions
Create and maintain technical support documentation, troubleshooting procedures, frequently asked questions, known-issue documentation, and internal support resources.
The goal is to solve a problem once and make the solution easier to provide the next time it occurs.
Improve the product
Technical support provides a unique view into how people actually use a product. Identify recurring problems, confusing workflows, usability issues, and common questions and provide those insights to product and engineering.
Great technical support doesn't just fix problems. It helps make the product better.
Important technical skills
Technical troubleshooting
Strong ability to investigate problems systematically, isolate variables, reproduce issues, and identify potential root causes.
Mobile application support
Comfort troubleshooting applications on iOS and Android, including application versions, operating-system versions, permissions, networking, notifications, authentication, and device-specific behavior.
Web application support
Understanding of modern web applications, browsers, caching, authentication, network requests, and common browser-related problems.
APIs & backend services
Basic understanding of APIs, HTTP requests and responses, client/server architecture, authentication, databases, and cloud-based services.
You don't necessarily need to build these systems, but you should understand how they interact.
Logs & debugging
Ability to review logs, error messages, crash information, network responses, and other diagnostic information to help identify problems.
Cloud services
Experience supporting applications using cloud infrastructure is strongly preferred. Familiarity with Firebase, Google Cloud, authentication systems, cloud functions, databases, storage, messaging, and monitoring tools is particularly useful.
Third-party integrations
Ability to troubleshoot problems involving external services and APIs, including authentication, messaging, payments, location services, AI services, and other platform integrations.
Basic software development knowledge
Working knowledge of software-development concepts and the ability to understand code is highly desirable. You don't need to be a full-time software developer, but should be technically capable of communicating effectively with engineers.
Important professional skills
Problem solving
You enjoy investigating difficult problems and don't stop at the first obvious explanation.
Communication
You can explain technical issues clearly to both engineers and people with little technical experience.
Customer focus
You understand that behind every support ticket is a person trying to accomplish something. Technical accuracy and a positive customer experience are equally important.
Organization & follow-through
You can manage multiple issues simultaneously, maintain accurate status information, and ensure problems don't disappear after being escalated.
Prioritization
You can distinguish between a minor individual problem and an issue affecting many users or critical platform functionality.
Attention to detail
Small details—device version, application version, exact error message, account state, sequence of actions—can make the difference between finding and missing a problem.
Self-direction
As an independent contractor, you should be comfortable managing your responsibilities and investigating issues without constant supervision.
Curiosity
You naturally want to understand how things work and why they fail.
Who we're looking for
We're looking for someone who:
- Has experience in technical support, support engineering, software engineering, QA, systems administration, or a related technical field
- Has strong troubleshooting and analytical skills
- Is comfortable supporting mobile and web applications
- Understands basic client/server and cloud architecture
- Can investigate and document software defects
- Can communicate effectively with software engineers
- Can explain technical concepts to nontechnical users
- Is organized and dependable
- Takes ownership of problems through resolution
- Can independently manage multiple technical issues
- Is comfortable working in a startup environment where responsibilities may evolve
Experience supporting consumer applications, SaaS platforms, social/community applications, or cloud-based mobile applications is especially valuable.
Preferred experience
Experience with one or more of the following is a plus:
- iOS and Android troubleshooting
- Firebase and Google Cloud Platform
- Cloud Functions
- Authentication and identity systems
- REST APIs and JSON
- Database troubleshooting
- Push notifications
- Application logging, monitoring and crash reporting
- GitHub or similar development tools
- Bug tracking systems
- QA and software testing
- Payment platforms such as Stripe
- Messaging or verification services such as Twilio
- AI-powered application services
- Location and address services
What success looks like
Success in this role means problems are identified quickly, communicated clearly, and driven toward resolution. Key outcomes may include:
- Technical issues resolved accurately and efficiently
- High-quality escalation of software defects
- Reduced time to identify and reproduce problems
- Critical issues identified and escalated quickly
- Strong support for Community Ambassadors and partners
- Clear communication with users and internal teams
- Accurate support and troubleshooting documentation
- Recurring technical problems identified
- Verified resolution of reported defects
- Product improvements identified through support trends
Independent contractor relationship
The Technical Support Engineer provides services to The Word. as an independent contractor and not as an employee of The Word. or Skyline Software Inc.
The contractor is responsible for independently managing how contracted services are performed, subject to agreed-upon responsibilities, deliverables, service expectations, security requirements, and applicable contractual requirements.
Independent contractors are responsible for their own taxes, insurance, equipment, expenses, and other obligations associated with operating as an independent contractor, except where otherwise specifically agreed to in writing. This opportunity does not create an employer-employee relationship and does not include employee benefits.
Specific compensation, support responsibilities, availability expectations, deliverables, confidentiality requirements, data-security requirements, intellectual-property provisions, and payment terms will be established in the applicable independent contractor agreement.
Why join The Word.
The Technical Support Engineer will have an opportunity to influence much more than support. You'll see firsthand where users encounter problems, where organizations need help, and where the product can improve.
You'll work directly with Community Ambassadors, product leaders, and engineers to turn those observations into a better experience for the communities we serve.
We're looking for someone who doesn't just want to answer tickets. We want someone who wants to help us build a better product.
The Word.™ — Where Good Takes Action.
How to apply
If you're interested, please send your resume to [email protected], or call us at 1-877-885-2459 and speak with Melissa.