Support becomes a financial burden.
Reactive work grows faster than the systems meant to absorb it.
Assaf Barnir · Operator + Engineer
I rebuild customer-facing technical orgs
for the AI era.
I've built and scaled customer-facing technical organizations at PubNub, Netomi, and RapidAPI — and I'm doing it today at Sentry.io. Rebuilding for the AI era is an operating-model problem.
Now Sentry.io
Customer-facing engineering at scale — skin in a live org I love.
Then RapidAPI
Onboarding, Support, and Customer Management for a developer platform, shaped early.
Before Netomi
AI-native customer service from the inside — plus Sales Engineering, CSM, and Onboarding.
Earlier PubNub
All the customer-facing technical orgs, for real-time infrastructure.
First Zendesk
Professional Services and Solutions Architecture — the vendor side of the same table.
The operating pattern
Adding people stopped being a strategy.
The old customer organization was designed around queues, coverage, and handoffs. The next one connects technical judgment, automation, product signal, and customer trust into one operating system.
Strategic customers pull everyone upward.
The hardest accounts start consuming executives, product, and engineering.
AI changes the work — not only the tooling.
Roles, judgment, escalation, talent, and trust all move together.
customer_org.system — live
❯ inspect --customer-org
01
Support Engineers
reactive ──▶ engineered 02
Sales Engineers
heroics ──▶ system 03
Solutions Architects
one-off wins ──▶ repeatable motion 04
Customer Success
coverage ──▶ leverage 05
Forward Deployed Engineers
experiment ──▶ growth engine 06
Talent
headcount ──▶ capabilityOutput: scale without gambling customer trust.
Or type it yourself
assaf@barnir.co — bash
barnir.co — a real terminal. type a command below, hit Enter.
❯
Commands
100s
People hired
4*
Books
13+
Products built
The operator
I'm an engineer who's built pre- and post-sales technical teams from the ground up — Support Engineering, Customer Success, Solutions Engineering, and Technical Account Management. I've been the first CS hire, helped other companies make their first customer-facing technical hires, and scaled those functions into world-class orgs — hiring in the hundreds along the way. I know what the table looks like from every side. I even built barnirhired — an AI job-fit tool for the same roles I've spent a career hiring.
Operator judgment
What I bring to the table.
An operator who still has skin in a live org — I've earned the scars in the functions most boards only see as a cost line.
The customer-facing technical org, as a system.
Support, SE, CS, TAM, FDE — shape, handoffs, and leverage. Not ticket theater.
The AI transition, without breaking trust or revenue.
Quality, escalation, ownership, kill switches. Operating model first, vendor second.
Signal from the edge.
What customers and frontline technical teams are actually saying — before the dashboard lies.
Operator proof
The proof is in the work.
Built, shipped, and used.
Book + AI skill Open source
The Support Machine
A full book and executable AI-agent skill for moving customer support from chatbot theater to a trustworthy operating model.
I wrote the field guide for the AI support migration — and shipped it as a working AI skill.
Grounded AI agent Hackathon entry
Flux
A live onboarding intelligence agent that maps how a team actually works from GitLab and Notion signals, then proposes a safe first task.
AI applied to a real org problem — grounded in how teams actually work, not how the wiki says they do.
Hiring signal Live
barnirhired
An AI job-fit analysis tool for customer-facing technical roles — built from a career of hiring for them.
I know this talent market from both sides of the table — well enough to ship a product for it.
The Lab
Not everything I build is for a boardroom.
Some projects exist because I couldn't not build them. The instinct is the same one I bring to the work.
Political simulation Live
Conflict: 2027
A 48-turn political simulation that makes sustainable peace winnable, difficult, and legible through the systems surrounding it.
Built at an AWS Loop Hacking hackathon.
Therapeutic software Open source
Vessel
A therapeutic writing environment inspired by EMDR, designed to help difficult thoughts move instead of harden.
Learning experience Live + open source
Ada Quest
Interactive browser missions that teach Ada and SPARK through small systems bugs, compiler-style feedback, and proof.
Human ↔ agent network Live
Agent Switchboard
Where humans and agents find each other, signal what they need, and show what they can do.
Recent signal
What's shipping
Latest post, latest build, latest book.
Latest writing
Why Your CS Team Isn't Surviving the AI Transition
The playbook most CS leaders are running is built for a world that no longer exists.
Read → Latest buildConflict: 2027
A 48-turn political simulation where sustainable peace is winnable, difficult, and never guaranteed.
Read → Latest bookThe Support Machine
A full manuscript and executable AI skill for deploying AI in customer support without breaking trust. Free and open source.
Read →Specialists with scars get seats.
The AI era doesn't need less humanity — it needs better systems around it.
Engineer by training · Operator by repetition · Builder by instinct · No fear.
What are you trying to change?
▎ Slides don't ship. I do.
▎ No calendar gate. No pitch deck required.