About Ancestry:
When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, connects everyone with their past so they can discover, preserve, and share their unique family stories. With our unparalleled collection of more than 65 billion records, over 3.5 million subscribers, and over 27 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.
We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.
Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve.
Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? Join the curious.
technical person with experience working with digitization, archival
documents, and goal oriented projects. You are efficient, show great care
for detail, and are accustomed to independent work in an environment that
handles focused and repetitive tasks. This is a full-time opportunity working
Monday through Friday from 9:00 am- 5:00 pm, 40 hours a week and will last for about 1 year. You will report to the Manager, Content Production. This is not a work-from-home position. This position is contract-based and is not eligible for Ancestry benefits.
Compensation will be $21 - $26 per hour depending on experience.
Employment is contingent upon successfully passing a pre-employment background check.
Ancestry is seeking an Imaging Support Specialist to serve as the technical backbone of our Imaging Operations pipeline. This is a deeply technical role that requires developing expert-level knowledge of Ancestry's custom, proprietary imaging systems — the kind of knowledge that can only be built through hands-on production work, direct collaboration with engineering, and systematic investigation of complex issues from symptom to root cause.
The Imaging Support Specialist is the bridge between imaging production teams and development. They diagnose problems others can't, build and maintain the knowledge needed to fix issues independently, and translate messy production realities into actionable work for developers. They also participate in production tasks — running imports, executing content prep work, and operating inside the same systems they support — because fluency with the tools comes from using them daily, not from reading about them.
This role requires strong technical aptitude, a genuine appetite for learning unfamiliar systems from the inside out, operational awareness across domestic and international workflows, and the cross-functional collaboration skills to drive resolution across Scanning, Content Prep, Imaging Data, and Image Quality. This is an in-office (Draper, UT) position with a target shift of 9am – 5pm and minimal flexibility for remote work.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain deep, working expertise in Ancestry's custom imaging systems, internal tools, and production workflows - learning each system from the inside out through hands-on use, investigation, and partnership with teams.
- Own tier 2 support for production-impacting issues from intake to resolution, including non-standard and high-complexity scenarios - diagnosing root causes across hardware, software, proprietary systems, and cloud-based tools rather than applying surface-level fixes.
- Independently investigate unfamiliar problems by reading logs, tracing data through systems, querying databases, and building hypotheses before escalating - reducing reliance on development for issues resolvable in-team.
- Execute production work - including image imports, content prep tasks, and hands-on operation of imaging systems - both to support throughput and to build the system fluency required for effective support.
- Partner directly with development to investigate defects, reproduce issues, prioritize fixes, and drive enhancements through completion.
- Monitor production workflows and coordinate issue resolution across Scanning, Content Prep, Imaging, Data Operations, and Quality teams to ensure continuity, efficiency, and SLA adherence across domestic and international operations.
- Identify workflow bottlenecks, assess risk, and proactively escalate to minimize operational impact.
- Support vendor and remote site scan operations through technical guidance, troubleshooting, and escalation support.
- Track and complete operational initiatives and small-to-medium projects, ensuring accountability and timely delivery.
- Maintain clear, current documentation of workflows, known issues, system processes, and resolution patterns to support operational consistency, onboarding, and scalability.
- Translate technical challenges into clear, actionable insights for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Continuously identify opportunities to improve processes, enhance efficiency, and support scalable operations.
- Perform additional duties and special projects as assigned by the Content Production Manager.
Required Qualifications
- 2–5 years of relevant experience in operations support, technical support, or production environments.
- Demonstrated ability to learn unfamiliar, undocumented, or proprietary systems independently — reading logs, tracing workflows, experimenting in controlled ways, and building mental models of how systems behave.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across hardware, software, and multi-system workflows, including root cause analysis rather than symptom-only fixes.
- Working familiarity with ticketing systems (Workfront, Jira, ServiceNow, or similar) in a production environment.
- Comfortable with Windows hardware tasks, including swapping peripherals, storage drives, and handling basic configuration.
- Experience partnering with engineering or development teams to investigate, reproduce, and resolve defects.
- Demonstrated ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, production-driven environment.
- Experience with project coordination or project management principles.
- Strong problem-solving skills with a solutions-oriented, ownership-driven mindset.
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
- Ability to work independently with high initiative, taking ownership of outcomes without constant direction.
Preferred Qualifications
- Working knowledge of SQL or database queries for investigating data issues.
- Familiarity with APIs, system integrations, or reading/writing basic scripts (Python, shell, etc.) to automate investigation or validation.
- Experience with cloud-based systems or services (AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Experience working with distributed or vendor-based teams.
- Background in digitization, imaging (photography), or content production workflows.
- Knowledge of hardware systems (scanners, imaging equipment).
- Prior experience in a role that required ramping on proprietary or heavily customized software stacks.
Success Profile
A successful Production Support Specialist:
- Anticipates issues before they impact production.
- Takes full ownership of problems from identification to resolution - including the learning required to solve them.
- Develops genuine fluency in proprietary systems rather than staying at surface-level familiarity.
- Brings structure and clarity to complex, ambiguous workflows.
- Builds strong working relationships with engineering and treats the engineering partnership as a two-way technical collaboration, not a handoff.
- Continuously improves processes, documentation, and operational efficiency.
Additional Information:
Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.
All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law. For candidates who live in San Francisco, CA, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.
What We Do
Ancestry is the global leader in family history and consumer genomics. Every day, around the world, we help curious people like you embark on journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. With our unparalleled collection of more than 40 billion records from more than 80 countries and 23+ million people in our growing DNA network, Ancestry helps customers discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. For 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving and sharing their story.
Why Work With Us
When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. We believe that by discovering the struggles and triumphs of our past, we can foster deeper bonds and more meaningful connections among families and communities.
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