If you'd rather go old-school then you can find my CV here.
Hi, I'm Jaynil — an enthusiastic new runner currently training for two charity marathons (London and Sydney) who would love to join the Technical Support Team at Runna.
At my current company I'm the first point of contact for customers when something breaks, and also the one who debugs the issue and delivers a solution. For the past three years I've collaborated with engineers working at a fast-paced startup and enjoy building consumer-facing websites in my spare time.
I built this website to make my application a more engaging experience for you. Each page can be summarized using the toggle in the top right, and if you're really pressed for time I'd skip to the end for a Runna-coded surprise.
Either way, I promise not to take more than 1km of your time (assuming a 5 min split).
Hi, I'm Jaynil - currently working at an e-commerce startup as the person customers message when something breaks, and the one who checks the logs to find, deliver, and communicate a solution. I'd love to do the same for Runna - a company I've fallen increasingly in love with since starting training for the London and Sydney marathons this year.
Success in this role requires both the technical fluency to solve problems and the empathy to communicate effectively with customers and colleagues. I built this site as a way of showing that I have both. I hope you have the time to enjoy it all; but if you don't, I highly recommend skipping to the end!
I'm not just excited about Runna as a product, but because this role is built around the people and problems I already find myself working on for fun. Here's what I mean:
Three reasons I think we'd be a good match — beyond the obvious "I like running and I like your app":
You can get a marathon training plan for free, but people choose (and more importantly, stay) with Runna because of how the product talks to them. That conversation between the product and the user makes every support interaction essential to retention, especially when things go wrong. I want to work at a company that treats support as part of the product; not just a cost centre bolted onto the side of it.
Runna's magic lies in how it talks to its users, which makes every support interaction part of the product. That's the kind of support team I want to work with.
Like many Runnas, I'm still figuring out my running week by week, so I haven't forgotten what it feels like to be confused by my plan or frustrated by a bug that wiped 10km from my Weekend Long Run. Being closer to the customer journey equips me with the empathy needed to provide effective support that meets users where they are.
As a new runner I feel like I have the perfect combination of domain knowledge and customer empathy that's hard to teach but easy to apply.
When customers kept asking for updates on their orders, so I built a self-serve tracking platform that halved our inbound support volume. I wanted a better way to fundraise for my marathon, so I built jaynil.xyz — a site that pulls live data from the Strava API and has an AI chat feature that answers the questions people ask about my training. I'm at my happiest asking people about their problems and building solutions that delight them in the process.
Whether it's my marathon fundraising site, or this application page, I love finding opportunities to improve user experiences in a way that saves time and produces a smile.
I understand that my lack of experience sitting in a support team that handles the volume of support tickets that Runna receives is a potential red flag.
But I think the core of this role, like understanding what a user is telling you, investigating the problem efficiently, and communicating the answer clearly are all things I have been doing across every role I've had. The tooling gap is real; but I'm confident it's the shorter learning curve.
And for what it's worth, the variety of my experience does come with potential bonuses:
Whilst I've used most, but not all, of the specific tools listed in the job description, I think success in this role is defined more by how you think, how fast you learn, and how well you work with others. And in that respect, the variety of my experience has its bonuses:
Probably nowhere near the level of your actual engineers, but comfortable enough to reproduce a bug, or speak to the product and tech teams in a language they understand.
Not quite an engineer, but literate enough to be useful to a customer or team member.
Product background means I instinctively think about why a problem keeps happening, not just how to fix it in isolation.
I notice when problems recur and think about how to prevent them from happening again.
After 2+ years at a seed-stage company, I'm used to owning problems end-to-end and working with engineers to ship at speed. I also understand the value of going the extra mile for a customer (and enjoy the feeling of doing so!).
Comfortable owning problems end-to-end and going the extra mile for a customer.
Since studying History at uni I've designed websites, written (and often broken) APIs, and led customer support for an e-commerce startup. I'm comfortable speaking to the right people to learn whatever the problem in front of me requires.
I've gone from writing essays on the Norman Conquest to debugging Python errors to solve shipping rate errors for customers around the world.
One last thing
How was it?