Founding Customer Success Manager

Artie•San Francisco, CA

13d•$170,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

Artie is hiring a Founding Customer Success Manager to own customer relationships after contract signature, including onboarding, adoption, renewals, and account growth. The role combines technical customer advising with commercial account ownership. Customers are data engineers and platform leads running Artie in production, and the CSM will troubleshoot many issues directly while managing renewals, expansions, contract negotiations, and customer outcomes. The CSM will work closely with Artie's founders, sales, and engineering teams and establish the practices and standards for future customer success and account management hires. This is a full-time, in-person role 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 personally negotiating renewals and expansions, including pricing, multi-year terms, procurement, and security reviews.
Ability to maintain accurate forecasts and keep CRM records aligned with reality.
Ability to build relationships with technical practitioners through senior leaders such as VPs and CTOs.
Technical proficiency sufficient to earn data engineers' trust, including comfort with 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 updates.
Comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage startup and creating processes where none are established.
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 contract signature through onboarding, renewal, and expansion.
Serve as the primary point of contact for assigned accounts.
Run onboarding, including kickoff calls, Engineering preparation, onboarding trackers, and plans to reach first production pipelines.
Establish regular review cadences with key accounts and understand their use of Artie and future roadmaps.
Build and maintain account health views using customer data and AI tools, including usage, pipeline status, open issues, and stakeholder coverage.
Troubleshoot customer issues such as replication lag, schema changes, and connector configuration, involving Engineering when needed.
Own the customer-facing side of incidents by communicating timelines, root causes, and preventive measures.
Run renewals beginning three months in advance, including usage reviews, pricing, terms, and customer conversations.
Forecast renewals in the CRM and flag risks early.
Negotiate contract terms, multi-year commitments, and price changes, and manage procurement and security reviews.
Carry a renewal and expansion target for the assigned book of business.
Develop account plans for top customers, covering stakeholders, current use cases, and growth opportunities.
Build relationships with data leaders, platform owners, and budget holders in addition to day-to-day engineering contacts.
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.
Bring customer patterns to Product and Engineering to inform the roadmap.
Develop 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 scale of customer coverage.