Senior Customer Success Manager

Tavus•San Francisco, CA

27d

About The Position

Tavus is hiring a hands-on individual contributor to own an existing portfolio of customers building products and experiences with conversational AI. Reporting to the Customer Lead, the Senior Customer Success Manager will guide customers through implementation, adoption, and renewal, manage day-to-day relationships, coordinate technical partners, and keep customer commitments moving. The portfolio includes active implementations and established customers between renewal cycles; the role involves inheriting unfinished work, building trust, and establishing clear plans. The role owns customer relationships, account plans, communications, and commercial readiness. It works closely with Customer Engineering on implementation and troubleshooting, and with Support, Product, and Engineering to coordinate technical work, clarify capabilities and limitations, and keep customers informed. Routine account decisions are handled independently within agreed priorities and commercial guidelines, while strategic escalations, pricing exceptions, and commitments beyond existing scope are handled with the Customer Lead and relevant functional owners. The successful candidate will establish account plans and customer cadences, drive adoption and value, prepare and execute renewals, identify credible expansion opportunities, maintain actionable account records, and improve reusable guidance and operating practices. Success includes taking over the agreed portfolio, ensuring commitments and risks are visible, delivering accurate customer updates, grounding adoption and renewal plans in evidence, and enabling the Customer Lead to focus more capacity on strategic accounts and the broader customer organization.

Requirements

Experience independently managing a portfolio of B2B customers through implementation, adoption, and renewal.
Experience with APIs, AI, infrastructure, developer tools, or another technical product where customer implementation materially affects success.
Ability to enter an account with incomplete information, ask focused questions, and establish a coherent plan.
Commercial judgment connecting product performance, usage, customer economics, sponsorship, and business value to retention and expansion.
Strong follow-through across multiple accounts and internal teams; ability to keep commitments visible and recognize when stalled next steps require decisions.
Clear writing and sound judgment in difficult customer conversations; ability to communicate uncertainty honestly, raise bad news early, and adapt detail to the audience.
Technical fluency sufficient to understand an integration, gather useful evidence, and work credibly with engineers; production software development is not required.
Evidence of prioritizing competing demands, challenging ineffective proposed solutions, and setting realistic expectations while maintaining trust.
Comfort improving processes while using them and establishing useful structure without waiting for a finished playbook.

Responsibilities

Own an assigned portfolio and build relationships with customer users, implementers, and buyers; understand business objectives, success criteria, decision processes, and renewal intent.
Translate customer goals into plans with milestones, owners, dependencies, and decision dates; carry buying context and scope into onboarding or reconstruct missing context for existing accounts.
Manage dependable customer communication by acknowledging requests, clarifying impact, assigning internal owners, setting update expectations, and communicating changes.
Drive adoption and customer value by identifying stalled implementations, weak engagement, and unrealized use cases, diagnosing constraints, and coordinating interventions.
Prioritize attention across accounts based on customer impact, revenue, growth potential, urgency, and implementation complexity; make capacity tradeoffs explicit.
Coordinate technical work with Customer Engineering, Support, Product, and Engineering, supplying customer context and tracking work to a verified answer or agreed next step.
Prepare and execute renewals for assigned accounts by assessing intent, maintaining an evidence-based forecast, developing recommendations, and coordinating decisions with the Customer Lead and Sales on negotiations and commercial approvals.
Identify credible expansion opportunities that connect use cases to a buyer, business outcome, and feasible deployment path, and refer qualified opportunities to the appropriate commercial owner.
Maintain current account records covering objectives, implementation status, usage, sponsorship, risks, commitments, and next decisions; distinguish progress from completion and interest from commitment.
Improve operating practices by turning recurring questions and successful interventions into reusable guidance, onboarding practices, and adoption and renewal playbooks; surface product and documentation gaps with evidence of customer impact.
Escalate ownerless requests, missing delivery plans, or unclear scope with the customer impact, options, and decision needed; set expectations without promising uncommitted work.
Establish portfolio understanding and stakeholder relationships during the first 30 days, run customer cadence independently by 60 days, and transfer routine account coordination and ownership of commitments, risks, and renewal plans by 90 days.