Customer Strategy & Ops

Introduction

Hi, I'm Al and I lead Customer Operations at Candid. As a team, we’re primarily responsible for delivering valuable outcomes with and for our customers. Prior to Candid, I led teams at McKinsey & Co for 5 years, based in both NYC and Sydney, Australia. I started my career as an M&A lawyer at Allens, a top Australian law firm.

We’re hiring for outstanding folks on my team, and I want to tell you a bit about how we think about this role, because it's different from what you'll find at most companies - and that difference is very intentional.

At Candid, our model is one where a single, empowered individual is responsible for delivering outcomes with and for customers. Our internal name for this role is “Valkyrie” and it originally evolved out of necessity. In the early days of Candid, as with many startups, it was impossible to have separate people owning all the things required to help customers win; one person had to integrate across all of it. What we found is that this isn’t just a startup constraint - it is an incredibly effective way to organize ourselves. A single, empowered owner who can move fluidly across functional boundaries will outperform a team of specialists nearly every time, especially in a domain as complex and fragmented as revenue cycle management.

As we've scaled to ~200 people, we've intentionally preserved that model. We've split off certain functionally specialized supporting teams - such as Customer Support, Implementation, Forward Deployed Engineering, and Training & Enablement - but the Valkyrie remains the single-point owner of customer outcomes. The anti-pattern we actively resist is the substance-light CSM role that's mostly about relationship management and renewal motions. To be effective at Candid, you have to be willing and able to operate at the lowest tactical level - iterating on prompts for agent phone calls to navigate payer IVRs, debugging detailed syntax errors in EDI rejections with a clearinghouse, mapping hundreds of fields between a legacy system and ours - and then zoom out to shape the strategic direction of an account. Some might describe that work as unglamorous, but the best people on this team relish doing it, because that's where the valuable outcomes live.

The shape of person who thrives here tends to be a low-ego, high-slope generalist. They are resourceful, laser-focused on value delivery, and wired to expand into unowned space rather than wait for scope to be handed to them. This is not a role where your responsibilities are neatly defined and bounded. Valkyries see what needs to happen and make it happen, often before anyone asks. When you spot a gap between teams, an unowned customer problem, or an emerging product opportunity, the expectation is that you move toward it.

That bet - that a scrappy, resourceful generalist given space and expansive ownership will outperform a specialist - has paid off at every stage of Candid's growth. I'm looking for people who will keep proving it right.