Customer Success Lead

This is not a “client relationship” role where you send check-in emails and pray they renew.

This is a retention-and-expansion role where you own the number. You are the client’s first call when something breaks and their last call before they renew. If a client churns on your watch, it is your failure. If a client expands, it is your win. There is no “team effort” caveat.

Our client is an AI-powered business operations company that combines AI with human-in-the-loop quality assurance to automate complex, accuracy-critical workflows for enterprise clients. They have plans to aggressively expand across multiple verticals — financial services, legal, healthcare, and media — serving some of the most demanding companies in the US. The team has scaled past 1,000 people and the company is in a phase of aggressive growth.

You will be the company’s first dedicated Customer Success hire. The function exists at 0.5 today — leadership has the vision, the systems are being built, and the client relationships are strong. What’s missing is someone who can own it, build the playbook, and operate as the face of the company to clients who are used to dealing with the founder directly.

This is a generational opportunity for the right person.

Hard Requirements

These are non-negotiable. If you don’t meet all four, this role is not for you right now.

* US Timezone Hours: You must be willing and able to work consistently on Eastern Time (ET) or Pacific Time (PT). Our clients are US-based enterprise companies. Their VPs and Directors operate on US hours and expect real-time responsiveness. Where you live is your choice — when you work is not.

* 7-Figure Account Experience: You have personally owned and managed client accounts valued at $1M+ annually. Not as a support function. Not as part of a team of six. You held the relationship, you ran the QBRs, and you were the person the client called when things went sideways. If your largest account was $200K, you are not ready for this.

* Enterprise Client Fluency: You have worked directly with senior stakeholders (VP-level and above) at companies where decisions move slowly, contracts are complex, and the cost of switching providers is high. You understand procurement cycles, legal review, and multi-stakeholder buy-in. SMB or mid-market experience alone does not qualify.

* Professional English (Native-Level): Your written and spoken English must be indistinguishable from a native speaker in a professional context. You will be on video calls with C-suite executives at US companies, drafting emails that go to VPs at financial data firms, and presenting QBRs to rooms that expect polish. If you have to pause to find the right word in a commercial negotiation, this is not the role.

The Trade-Off

What You Give

* Your full focus, 6 days a week. This is not a 9-to-5 with Slack on mute after hours. When a client emails at 4:47 PM Eastern with an urgent quality issue, you are the one who responds — not tomorrow morning, not after your meeting. Now.

* Your ego. You will be told your QBR deck is not good enough. You will be told your escalation email missed the point. You will be coached directly and frequently. If you need positive reinforcement to function, this will be a hard environment for you.

* Your comfort with “good enough.” Our clients pay enterprise rates and expect enterprise outcomes. “It’s pretty close” is not a standard we accept.

What You Get

* Front-row exposure to how the most demanding companies in financial services, legal, and healthcare operate. You will understand their workflows, their decision-making, their politics — the kind of knowledge that takes a decade to accumulate at a normal company.

* Direct relationships with C-suite stakeholders at companies most people only read about on TechCrunch. These relationships compound. They follow you for the rest of your career.

* A masterclass in enterprise account management at a company growing faster than your last three employers combined. You will learn more about client retention in 12 months here than in 5 years at a SaaS company running playbooks someone wrote in 2019.

* A track to Head of Customer Success. Build the playbook, prove the model, hire the team. This is a leadership trajectory for someone who executes.

The Scope of Work

1. Account Ownership (50%)

* Retention Machine: You own renewal rates. You do not wait for the contract to expire to start the conversation. You are running health checks, flagging risk 90 days out, and building expansion proposals before the client even thinks about shopping around.

* Escalation Handler: When delivery slips, quality drops, or a client is frustrated — you are the first responder. You do not forward the email to ops and wait. You triage, communicate, and fix. If the client has to escalate past you to the CEO, you have already failed.

* Revenue Expansion: You identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities as a reflex. If a client is using 30% of our capability, that is your problem. You build the business case, walk the client through ROI, and close the expansion. CS is a revenue function here, not a retention function.

2. Client Operations (30%)

* Onboarding Architect: You design the onboarding experience for new enterprise clients. Timelines, milestones, success criteria — all defined before kickoff. No client should ever ask “what happens next?”

* QBR Owner: Quarterly business reviews are strategic conversations, not slide readings. You show the client their ROI in hard numbers, flag risks before they become problems, and propose the next phase of expansion. If your QBR does not end with a clear commercial next step, you wasted everyone’s time.

* Voice of the Client: You are the client’s representative inside the company. Product gaps, delivery issues, workflow-specific needs — you synthesise and escalate with data, not anecdotes. If the engineering team doesn’t know about a critical client pain point, that is on you.

3. Cross-Functional Bridge (20%)

* Ops & Engineering Translation: You sit between clients who speak in outcomes and internal teams who speak in systems. When a client says “quality is slipping,” you translate that into a specific, actionable escalation that operations and engineering can act on. You don’t just relay the complaint — you diagnose it.

* Competitive Intelligence: You know who else is selling to your clients. You know their pricing, their pitch, and their weaknesses. You use this intelligence to defend and expand accounts — not reactively when a client threatens to leave, but proactively as part of how you manage the relationship.

* AI Discernment: The company uses AI extensively in its operations. You don’t need to be an engineer — but you need to understand the difference between what AI can reliably deliver and what requires human oversight. When a client asks “Why can’t you just automate this?” you need to be able to explain — credibly and without jargon — why the human-in-the-loop model exists and why it protects them.

The DNA

Skills can be trained. These traits cannot.

* Client-First Instinct: When something goes wrong, your first thought is “How do I protect this relationship?” not “How do I protect myself?” You take ownership before anyone asks you to. You over-communicate when things are uncertain. You never let a client be surprised by bad news.

* Revenue-Minded: You think in NRR, logo retention, and expansion revenue. You understand that a CS lead who doesn’t grow accounts is just an expensive support ticket router.

* Operator, Not Presenter: You do not just build the deck. You build the system behind the deck — the health scoring model, the risk flags, the renewal tracker, the escalation workflow. You think in systems, not slides.

* Composure Under Pressure: You will be on calls with frustrated VPs at 10pm your time. You will be asked questions you don’t have the answer to. The right response is calm, honest, and structured — not defensive, not flustered, not a wall of apologies.

* AI-Native: You use AI tools daily to accelerate your work — account research, meeting prep, client comms, reporting. You don’t need to be a developer, but you need to be someone who reaches for AI as a default, not a novelty. More importantly, you need to know when AI output is good enough to send and when it needs a human’s judgment.

* Discretion is Currency: You will see client contracts, revenue data, and internal performance metrics. A single breach of trust is a single-strike exit.

The Profile

* Experience: 4–8 years in Customer Success, Account Management, or Client Operations at a B2B technology or services company. Enterprise clients with contract values of $1M+ annually. You have personally managed a book of business, not supported one.

* Geography: Anywhere in the world. We do not care where you are based. We care that you can work US hours (Eastern or Pacific timezone) consistently, reliably, and without it affecting the quality of your work or your availability to clients.

* Hunger: You are in a season of life where building skills, compounding your network, and proving what you can do at scale matter more than a comfortable title or a predictable schedule.

Compensation

* Base: Competitive monthly salary

* Performance: Bonuses tied to retention rates, expansion revenue, and client satisfaction metrics

* Growth: This is a track to Head of Customer Success. Build the playbook, prove the model, hire the team, run the function.

How to Apply

Apply with your CV and a brief note (3–5 sentences, not a cover letter) answering one question: What is the largest client account you’ve personally managed, what was it worth annually, and what did you do to retain or expand it?

Candidates who pass initial screening will receive a practical assessment designed to test the exact skills described in this posting. If that sounds like extra work, this role is not for you. If it sounds like an opportunity to prove what you can do, we’d love to see it.