Founding Customer Success Manager

Artie•San Francisco, CA

12d•Onsite

About The Position

Artie is hiring a Founding Customer Success Manager to own customer outcomes and commercial relationships after contract signature, including onboarding, adoption, renewals, and account growth. The role serves as a trusted advisor and account owner for customers—primarily data engineers and platform leads running Artie in production—and works directly with the founders, Sales, and Engineering. The CSM will handle most technical troubleshooting independently while managing renewals, expansions, negotiations, and customer procurement and security reviews. This founding role will establish and scale Artie's Customer Success function. The CSM will create repeatable processes and metrics, bring customer insights to Product and Engineering, and use AI tools to automate manual work. The position is full-time and in-person at Artie's San Francisco Financial District office, five days per week; relocation is covered.

Requirements

At least 4 years of experience in Customer Success, Account Management, or Technical Account Management at a B2B SaaS company.
Experience carrying renewal and expansion targets for a book of business, with demonstrable GRR, NRR, or expansion results.
Experience independently negotiating renewals and expansions, including pricing, multi-year terms, procurement, and security reviews.
Ability to maintain an accurate, candid CRM forecast and proactively flag churn or renewal risks.
Ability to build relationships with hands-on engineers through VP- or CTO-level contract signers.
Technical proficiency sufficient to build trust with data engineers, including SQL, at least one relational database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQL Server), and at least one cloud warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Redshift).
Ability to read logs, reproduce problems, and write actionable bug reports for engineers.
Calm, direct communication during escalations and a willingness to provide clear, timely customer updates.
Comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage startup and creating processes rather than relying on established ones.
Willingness to work in person five days per week at the San Francisco office.

Nice To Haves

Experience in data infrastructure or developer tools.
Familiarity with change data capture, Kafka, or replication tools such as Fivetran, AWS DMS, Debezium, or Airbyte.
Experience with usage-based or tiered pricing and selling through AWS Marketplace.
Experience as an early or first Customer Success or account management hire who built the function.
Use of AI tools such as Claude to build dashboards, automate follow-ups, and improve productivity.

Responsibilities

Own customer relationships from signature through onboarding, renewal, and expansion as the primary point of contact.
Run onboarding, including kickoff calls, Engineering preparation, onboarding trackers, and plans for reaching the first production pipelines.
Set a regular review cadence with key accounts and understand their Artie use cases and roadmaps.
Build and maintain account health views using usage, pipeline status, open issues, and stakeholder coverage.
Troubleshoot customer issues such as replication lag, schema changes, and connector configuration, involving Engineering when needed.
Lead customer communications during incidents, including timelines, plain-language root causes, and prevention plans.
Manage renewals beginning three months in advance, including usage reviews, pricing, contract terms, and renewal discussions.
Forecast renewals in the CRM and identify risks early.
Negotiate contract terms, multi-year commitments, and price changes, and manage procurement and security reviews.
Carry a renewal and expansion number for the assigned book of business.
Create account plans for top accounts and build relationships with engineers, data leaders, platform owners, and budget holders.
Identify and close expansions, including new databases, teams, use cases, and higher-volume tiers, from scoping and pricing through proposal and signature.
Partner with Account Executives on onboarding handoffs and larger expansions.
Manage billing details, including invoicing contacts, AWS Marketplace private offers, and overdue invoice follow-up.
Develop customer references, case studies, and referrals.
Track customer feature requests and engineering workstreams, with clear priorities and owners, and share customer patterns with Product and Engineering to inform the roadmap.
Turn existing Customer Success practices into repeatable processes for onboarding, health scoring, QBRs, renewals, and escalations.
Define and report on Customer Success metrics, including GRR, NRR, time to first pipeline, and CSAT.
Use AI to automate manual work and increase the capacity of the Customer Success function.