Director Customer Success Engineering

Redpanda Data•Austin, TX

9d•Remote

About The Position

Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) - a new category in AI infrastructure that makes it simple and secure to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, Redpanda empowers agentic applications that reason and act in real-time with speed, autonomy, and precision. Global leaders including Activision Blizzard, Cisco, Moody's, Texas Instruments, Vodafone and 2 of the top 5 banks in the U.S. rely on Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data a day. Backed by premier venture investors Lightspeed, GV and Haystack VC, Redpanda is a diverse, people-first organization with teams distributed around the globe. About the Role: We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build and scale our Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team at Redpanda. You'll lead a team of Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects who ensure our customers successfully adopt and scale with Redpanda's streaming data platform. This is a leadership-first role. You need to be technical enough to hire exceptional talent, coach your team through complex customer engagements, and credibly represent CSE in product and engineering discussions. But your primary impact will come through team development, process excellence, and operational leverage—not being the most technical person in every room. Our CSE model is built on precision and leverage, not long-term embedded engagements. We deliver customer success through focused, high-impact interactions paired with reusable assets that scale our expertise. Rather than solving the same problem repeatedly for individual customers, we invest in creating content, reference architectures, and self-service resources that enable hundreds of customers to succeed independently. Think: targeted workshops and architecture sessions that accelerate time-to-value, combined with blogs, videos, documentation, and blueprints that customers can apply on their own. We work closely with pre-sales to understand opportunities early and ensure smooth handoffs from evaluation to production. And while we're primarily focused on technical enablement today, we're building the foundation for potential professional services offerings as we scale—so experience thinking about services evolution and monetization is valuable.

Requirements

Leadership experience 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Architecture, Forward Deployed Engineering, Professional Services, or Customer Success Engineering
3+ years leading and developing technical teams, ideally in high-growth B2B SaaS or infrastructure software
Track record of scaling teams and processes as organizations grow—experience leading traditional SA teams or forward deployed engineering organizations particularly relevant
Experience building coverage models that balance high-touch relationships with scaled programs
Comfort operating in a player-coach capacity when needed, but primarily focused on multiplying impact through your team
Understanding of the demands of working in a startup environment
Customer-first mindset with ability to balance customer advocacy with business priorities
Technical foundation Solid background in distributed systems (e.g. Kafka, streaming platforms, databases, Spark, Hadoop, etc.) sufficient to hire and coach effectively
Understanding of modern cloud architectures (AWS, GCP, Azure) and deployment patterns
Ability to have credible technical conversations with senior customer architects and engineers
Experience with technical content creation, enablement, and knowledge management
Familiarity with enterprise software sales cycles and how technical teams fit into customer journey from pre-sales through production
Adaptability to grasp emerging technologies and translate them into customer value—experience with AI/ML infrastructure or agentic systems a plus
Operating style Data-driven approach to team performance, customer health, and resource allocation
Bias toward creating leverage through content, programs, and repeatable processes rather than one-to-one consulting
Collaborative partner to Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success Management
Comfortable with ambiguity and building structures in a fast-moving environment
Strong written and verbal communication skills for both internal and customer-facing contexts
Ability to think strategically about services evolution, including potential paths to professional services offerings

Nice To Haves

Experience with open-source business models and community-led growth
Background in streaming data platforms, real-time analytics, event-driven or big data / distributed architectures
Prior experience in customer success operations or go-to-market analytics
Experience building or evolving professional services organizations

Responsibilities

Build and lead the team Hire, develop, and retain world-class Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects across different customer segments
Create career frameworks and growth paths that attract and retain top technical talent
Coach your team through complex customer engagements, helping them develop judgment on when to go deep vs. when to scale
Build processes and playbooks that create leverage—turning one-off solutions into repeatable patterns and reusable assets
Partner with Customer Success Management and Sales to align on account strategy, coverage models, and opportunity pipeline
Drive operational excellence through metrics, forecasting, and resource allocation across Tier 1/2/3 customers
Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, customer-first mindset, and continuous improvement
Collaborate with pre-sales teams to ensure technical win strategies translate into successful customer outcomes
Maintain technical credibility Stay current on streaming platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and emerging technologies like agentic AI to evaluate candidates and coach your team effectively
Participate in strategic customer conversations where executive-level technical leadership matters
Represent CSE in product roadmap discussions, translating customer needs into actionable feedback
Review and guide complex solution architectures, proof-of-concept designs, and reference implementations
Keep pace with Redpanda's product capabilities—including innovations like the Agentic Data Plane—competitive landscape, and streaming ecosystem
Drive scalable customer impact Champion the shift from one-off problem solving to creating reusable content and self-service resources
Build programs that multiply team impact: office hours, webinars, technical content series, solution blueprints
Ensure the team balances short-term precision engagements with building long-term leverage through documentation and enablement
Think strategically about how CSE capabilities could evolve into professional services offerings as the business scales