Customer Success Manager

Summary

OpenObserve is a developer-forward observability platform for modern, high-scale systems, helping engineering teams simplify logs, metrics, and traces. The Customer Success Manager will own customers’ technical journeys from proofs of concept through deployment, adoption, renewals, and expansion, while providing technical guidance and proactively driving customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

• POCs and pilots: Join evaluations before the contract is signed. Work with the account executive to agree success criteria, get the customer's data flowing, and make sure the pilot proves what it needs to prove
• Pilot to full deployment: Take customers from a successful pilot to production at full scale. Plan the cutover from their existing tools, get data sources, pipelines, dashboards, and alerts in place, and keep the project on schedule
• Adoption and outcomes: Build a success plan for each account tied to what the customer cares about, whether that's cost, incident response time, or coverage. Track usage and health, and act on early warning signs
• Technical guidance: Review architecture, ingestion, retention, and query performance. Recommend what to change and show them how, in the product, not on a slide
• Relationships: Build trust with the engineers who use OpenObserve every day and with the leaders who signed for it. Run business reviews people want to attend
• Renewals and expansion: Own or partner with sales on renewals. Spot expansion when a new team, data source, or use case appears, and work with the account executive to close it
• Escalations: When something breaks, coordinate support and engineering and keep the customer informed. You own the customer's experience even when you don't own the fix
• Voice of the customer: Bring patterns from your accounts to product and engineering, with enough detail that they can act on them
• The playbook: Write the POC templates, onboarding guides, migration runbooks, and training content that make the next customer faster than the last

Skills

• Has 4+ years in a technical role such as software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering, and wants to spend more of the week with customers
• Has real observability experience. You've used, run, or supported tools like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic, and you have opinions about what good monitoring looks like
• Is technical enough to be credible with engineers. You're comfortable with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, and log, metric, and trace pipelines. You can write SQL, read a config file, and reproduce a problem yourself before you escalate it
• Understands the difference between support and success. You don't measure your week in tickets closed. You measure it in whether your customers are getting closer to what they set out to do
• Has high emotional intelligence. You hear the frustration under a polite email. You know when an engineer wants an answer and when an executive wants reassurance. You can deliver bad news without getting defensive and without losing the room
• Is smart and curious. You want to know why something works, not just that it does. You'll dig into a customer's stack because you find it interesting, and you learn new technology fast
• Communicates clearly, in writing and in person, with hands-on engineers and with executives
• Has commercial sense, or wants to build it. You don't need to have owned a renewal before, but you're curious about how the business side works and can tell an expansion opportunity from a favor
• Is organized. You can run a portfolio of accounts and several evaluations and migrations at once without dropping things
• Thrives in early-stage environments. You're comfortable with ambiguity and would rather build the process than inherit it
• Timezone overlap for core collaboration hours required
• Prior customer success or technical account management experience is a plus, not a requirement

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Has 4+ years in a technical role such as software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering, and wants to spend more of the week with customers
• Has real observability experience. You've used, run, or supported tools like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic, and you have opinions about what good monitoring looks like
• Is technical enough to be credible with engineers. You're comfortable with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, and log, metric, and trace pipelines. You can write SQL, read a config file, and reproduce a problem yourself before you escalate it
• Understands the difference between support and success. You don't measure your week in tickets closed. You measure it in whether your customers are getting closer to what they set out to do
• Has high emotional intelligence. You hear the frustration under a polite email. You know when an engineer wants an answer and when an executive wants reassurance. You can deliver bad news without getting defensive and without losing the room
• Is smart and curious. You want to know why something works, not just that it does. You'll dig into a customer's stack because you find it interesting, and you learn new technology fast
• Communicates clearly, in writing and in person, with hands-on engineers and with executives
• Has commercial sense, or wants to build it. You don't need to have owned a renewal before, but you're curious about how the business side works and can tell an expansion opportunity from a favor
• Is organized. You can run a portfolio of accounts and several evaluations and migrations at once without dropping things
• Thrives in early-stage environments. You're comfortable with ambiguity and would rather build the process than inherit it
• Timezone overlap for core collaboration hours required

Nice to Haves

• Prior customer success or technical account management experience is a plus, not a requirement

Benefits

• Bonus tied to retention and growth
• Meaningful equity
• Full benefits
• Flexible schedule
• Unlimited PTO
• Coaching from the CRO on the customer and commercial side while staying close to the technology
• Paths to senior and strategic customer success, solutions architecture, or leading the team as we scale
• Remote work in the United States