Director of Customer Success

Valency Systems • Berkeley, CA

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

Valency Systems is a small, dynamic team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building the global hub for the agentic research era. We're based in Berkeley, California, and we're building something that matters. If you care about open science, advancing research at the speed of thought, and using AI to accelerate discovery, we'd love to talk. Our team is hybrid. We come together in person at least 3 days a week, with the option for 2 days of remote work.

Valency is a PLG company. Researchers land on our platform through a free academic tier — no sales call, no gatekeeping. What happens after that first signup decides everything: whether they activate, whether they stick around, whether they become the reason a lab champions an enterprise Bond deal. That is a very different problem from managing a handful of enterprise accounts, and most companies hire two different people to solve it. Right now we need one. You will be Valency's first leader owning the full post-signup lifecycle, reporting directly to the founders and senior leadership. There is no existing function to inherit — no activation playbook for free-tier users, no health scoring, no defined motion for converting an engaged academic user into a paid relationship or an enterprise opportunity. You are building it from the ground up. This is a builder and operator role. In the near term you will be in the activation data yourself and on enterprise account calls yourself. As the team grows, you will hire and lead the people who do both with you.

Requirements

• Owned activation, retention, or lifecycle metrics for a PLG or freemium product — you know how to move an activation curve, not just describe one
• Led customer success or account management for technical B2B or infrastructure accounts through renewal and expansion — this is genuinely a hybrid role and we need both muscles, not one specialist stretching into the other
• Think in funnels and cohorts as naturally as you think in relationships
• Understand research culture, or can learn it fast — enough to earn trust with a free-tier grad student and a skeptical national lab research computing team in the same week
• Build systems, not just relationships or dashboards. You can stand up an activation playbook, a health-scoring model, and a conversion motion where none existed
• Comfortable being the analyst in the activation data and the strategist on the enterprise call — this role is hands-on before it is a management role
• Communicate fluently about activation and revenue in the same conversation, with users and with founders

Nice To Haves

• Experience with freemium or free-tier product motions aimed at a non-commercial user base (students, academics, researchers)
• Experience with technical, API-first, or MCP-based products
• Familiarity with academic publishing, research infrastructure, or national lab procurement
• Prior experience building a CS or growth/activation function from zero at an early-stage startup
• Background in a scientific discipline

Responsibilities

• Own the free academic tier funnel end-to-end — activation, engagement, retention — and define what "activated" actually means for a free-tier user
• Design and continuously test onboarding flows, in-product nudges, and lifecycle messaging that get free-tier researchers to value fast
• Build the motion for converting engaged free-tier users and academic champions into paid upgrades or enterprise Bond opportunities
• Design Valency's customer success playbook for national lab and enterprise accounts: onboarding, health scoring, QBR cadence, escalation paths, renewal process
• Build deep relationships with technical champions (research computing leads, staff scientists, lab administrators) and translate their evolving needs back into product and GTM priorities
• Own the numbers on both sides — free-to-paid conversion rate on the PLG side, net revenue retention and expansion on the enterprise side
• Partner with product and engineering on self-serve onboarding UX, and with sales on a clean handoff from closed deal to enterprise onboarding
• Define and track the metrics that matter across both motions — activation rate, conversion rate, time-to-value, NRR — and report on them to the founders
• Hire and build the team — both activation/lifecycle and customer success roles — as the free-tier user base and enterprise account base grow

Benefits

• competitive a benefits, salary and equity package
• 401(k) with matching

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed