Brandi Jones

I didn't set out to work in SaaS. I studied biology, then spent several years in research administration at two Texas universities and a research foundation, reviewing federal grant budgets, keeping faculty compliant with NIH, NSF, and DOD policy, and helping researchers hit funding deadlines that didn't care how complicated the paperwork got. It's detail-heavy, high-stakes work: one missed line item in a budget can hold up a project for months.

I moved into SaaS support because I wanted to be on the building side of the systems I used to depend on, rather than just working around their limitations. Kuali builds the Research Suite platform that a lot of the institutions I used to work with actually run on, so joining their support team felt less like a career change and more like switching seats at the same table.

Four plus years later, I'm the person 230+ higher education institutions reach when something in that platform breaks. I carry a full caseload (200+ a month) without ever dipping below 100% SLA compliance, and I own the customer side of that work end to end in Zendesk: intake, triage, macros, resolution. When something's wrong in a way that isn't obvious, I partner with Engineering to find the actual root cause instead of patching the symptom, one of those investigations knocked 10% off our resolution time company-wide. I also walk customers through REST API, XML, and integration setups, and the documentation I've built has pushed self-service resolution up 20%.

What I've gravitated toward most, though, is the work that outlasts a single ticket. I run the sessions where Engineering hears customer feedback directly instead of secondhand. I mentor the newer specialists on my team and I'm cross-training across every module in our platform so I'm not boxed into one corner of it. When a fix is hard enough that it takes several of us multiple days to work out, I make sure it gets written down so nobody has to solve it twice.

I'm looking for my next move in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, or Support Operations at a B2B SaaS company, ideally one where support isn't treated as a cost center but as a source of real product insight. I've been fully remote for my whole time at Kuali and do my best work on distributed teams that default to clear, written communication.

Outside of work, I'm usually planning a trip, hiking, trying a new restaurant, working through a puzzle, or winding down with a good book or movie, ideally with my family around.