Customer Success Team Lead (German-speaking)

Academic Key; München; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote Work

Equity

Mentorship

Development Budget

Home office budget

Holidays

Annual Retreat

Company Events

Tech Equipment

Job summary

Academic Key is seeking a Customer Success Team Lead (German-speaking) for a 100% remote role. This position blends hands-on account work with leadership responsibilities, guiding a growing CSM team through ISO 27001, SOC 2, TISAX, NIS 2 and DORA programs.

You’ll line-manage five CSMs, own onboarding, optimize workflows with AI, and drive renewals and upsells while maintaining a strong team culture and high customer satisfaction.

Qualifications

• Fluent German and English are required.
• Proven experience coaching CSMs or teams.
• 4+ years as a Customer Success Manager in B2B SaaS.

Responsibilities

• Lead the CSM team and line-manage CSMs with regular 1:1s and performance input.
• Own onboarding for new CSMs to accelerate productivity on first accounts.
• Allocate books and manage capacity as the team grows.
• Run a team health review on at-risk accounts, renewals and blockers.
• Own escalations, playbook, and game plan for the CSM team.
• Identify and build AI-driven workflows and automation.
• Drive upsell performance and coach on upsell opportunities.
• Manage end-to-end customer engagements including implementations and audits.

Skills

Fluent German

English fluent

Leadership

Coaching

Remote team management

AI workflows

Job description

Customer Success Team Lead (German-speaking)

Remote

About the Role

• Our CSM team has grown to five Customer Success Managers, each running a book of customers through ISO 27001, SOC 2, TISAX, NIS 2 and DORA.
• As the team keeps growing, we’re creating a dedicated Team Lead role: a manager who works alongside the CSMs every day and makes their coaching and development a priority!

What You’ll Do

• Lead the CSM team
• Line-manage the CSMs: regular 1:1s, structured feedback, input to performance reviews and individual development plans
• Own onboarding for new CSMs so they’re productive on their first accounts fast
• Allocate books and manage capacity across the team as customers and CSMs are added
• Run a team health review covering at risk accounts, renewals and onboarding blockers
• Own customer escalations within the CSM books
• Own the CSM playbook and keep it current
• Decide which CSM workflows to automate, and build the agents and automations with AI
• Drive the team's upsell performance
• Coach CSMs on spotting and running framework and service upsells within their books
• Keep the team's upsell pipeline clean and be accountable for the team's upsell number
• Run your own portfolio
• Manage customers end to end: implementation, audit readiness, ongoing compliance, and upsell within those accounts
• Stay close enough to the day-to-day work that your coaching is grounded in it

About You

• This is a player-coach role where you’ll be 60-70% hands-on operating with your own book of business, and 30-40% conducting management tasks.
• You’ll be the line manager for all CSMs and run 1:1s, feedback loops, onboarding, and provide inputs to performance reviews and career development, while keeping a reduced portfolio of your own customers (because we don’t think you can coach CSMs well on work you don’t do).
• You’ve managed or formally coached CSMs before for at least 1 year and want to keep doing it; this isn’t a first step into management.
• 4+ years as a Customer Success Manager in B2B SaaS, ideally with mid-market or DACH Mittelstand customers.
• Fluent German and English as our CSM team works with customers in both.
• Comfortable with a revenue component: you’ve carried an upsell or NRR target yourself and can coach others toward one.
• You’ve built automations or AI workflows for yourself or your team, not just used chat tools, and you’d want to do the same here.
• Structured and direct in feedback; you can run a hard performance conversation without the Head of CS in the room.
• You work well in a written-first remote team: clear specs and updates over meetings, high ownership, low need for synchronous oversight.

Nice to have

• Experience in compliance, information security or GRC (ISO 27001 or TISAX in particular).
• You have built or reworked a CSM onboarding programme before.
• You have worked in a fully remote team of a similar size.

Interview Process

• Screening call with Steve, our recruiter
• Interview with Kuba, Head of Customer Success
• Take-home challenge
• Challenge interview with Kuba and Fabiola, our CEO
• Culture interview with Grigory, CTO
• Meet for a final lunch in-person with Kuba (we’ll fly you!)

What we offer

• Remote Work: 100% remote work with a virtual office in Gather.
• Competitive Salary: Industry-competitive local salaries. We pay local rates that are at or above the market. We share this philosophy with GitLab.
• Equity: Generous equity package – we’re all owners of Secfix and beneficiaries of our collective success.
• Mentorship: We are backed by top VCs and accelerators and have direct access to world-class mentors.
• Development Budget: €1,000 annual personal development budget.
• Home office budget and access to co-working spaces.
• Holidays: 26 days holiday + local public holidays.
• Annual Retreat: Annual retreat to build connections and inspire ideas (this year we’ve met in Alicante, Spain!).
• Company Events: Company-wide events to build relationships and have some fun!
• Tech Equipment: Latest tech equipment (MacBook, monitors, headphones).

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