Customer Success Team Lead

Ryft; Manchester; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Ryft, the UK-regulated payment platform, is hiring its first Customer Success Team Lead. This role balances building the function with hands-on work, owning core processes, tooling, escalation paths, and hiring the team that runs it.

You'll stay close to merchants, managing high-value accounts, leading renewal conversations, and setting the standard by doing it yourself. Expect the scope to evolve from hands-on delivery to coaching and structure as the team grows.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in customer success, account management, or client services within fintech, payments, or SaaS.
• Experience building or shaping a customer success function from early stage.
• Comfort creating processes and working without a playbook.
• Hands-on with customers while taking on people leadership.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Ryft's customer success processes for onboarding, health scoring, renewal and expansion.
• Lead the tooling and metrics to scale the function without headcount growth.
• Hire and develop the team, define career paths and working practices.
• Own key merchant relationships and lead renewal and escalation conversations.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Compliance to relay customer insights.

Skills

Customer success

Account management

Client services

Tools

CS platform

Ticketing system

Reporting tooling

Job description

Ryft is the UK-regulated payment platform built for marketplaces, platforms, and omnichannel businesses. Founded by marketplace operators who felt the limitations of legacy processors firsthand, we've built embedded payment infrastructure: split payments, seller onboarding, recurring billing, escrow, and transaction monetisation.

Having recently closed our Series A, we're scaling fast: growing our merchant base, our team, and our ambitions. We're a small, high-output team, which means everyone here has real ownership over outcomes, including the people who join us next.

The Role

We're hiring our first Customer Success Team Lead. This is a role built for someone who wants to do two jobs well at once: build the function and be brilliant at the work itself.

There's no existing playbook to inherit here. You'll design how Ryft does customer success: the processes, the tooling, the escalation paths, and you'll hire and develop the team that runs it. At the same time, this isn't a role where you disappear into org charts and dashboards. In a team this size, our merchants need a steady, expert hand on their account today, not in a quarter's time — so you'll stay hands-on with a portfolio of key accounts, working escalations, running renewal conversations, and setting the standard for what great looks like by doing it yourself.

Expect the split to shift over time. Early on, you'll be 90% hands-on delivery while you learn our merchants and prove out processes; as the team grows, more of your time will move into coaching, hiring, and structure. We're honest that the balance will evolve, and we want someone who's energised by that trajectory.

What you'll do

Build the function

• Design and implement Ryft's core customer success processes: onboarding, health scoring, QBRs, renewal and expansion motions, and escalation management
• Choose and implement the tooling (CS platform, ticketing, reporting) that lets the team scale without adding headcount for every new merchant
• Define the metrics — retention, NRR, time-to-value, CSAT — and build the reporting to track them
• Hire, onboard, and develop the team members of the Customer Success team as merchant volume grows
• Create a clear career path and ways of working for the team you build, not just a reporting line

Stay close to the work

• Own a portfolio of key merchant relationships directly, acting as their trusted point of contact within Ryft
• Lead renewal, expansion, and escalation conversations personally for your highest-value or highest-risk accounts
• Partner directly with Product, Engineering, and Compliance to unblock merchant issues and feed real customer insight back into the roadmap
• Model the standard of service you want the wider team to deliver — the processes you design should come from what actually works with real merchants, not theory

What we're looking for

• Proven experience in a customer success, account management, or client services role within fintech, payments, or SaaS, including direct ownership of merchant/client relationships
• Experience building or significantly shaping a customer success function from an early stage — process, tooling, or team, ideally more than one of these
• Comfort operating without a playbook, in an environment where you're deciding what \"good\" looks like rather than inheriting it
• Genuine enthusiasm for staying hands-on with customers even as you take on people leadership — this is not a role for someone looking to move purely into management
• Strong grasp of payments, marketplace, or platform business models, or a fast learner who can get there quickly
• Clear, confident communication, comfortable working directly with founders and senior stakeholders in a small team

Nice to have

• Prior experience in a Series A/B fintech or payments scale-up
• Familiarity with FCA-regulated environments and the customer service expectations that come with them
• Experience setting up CS tooling

What you'll get

• The opportunity to build a function from the ground up and shape how Ryft supports every merchant that joins us
• Direct exposure to founders and leadership, with real influence over product and company decisions
• A seat at a fast-growing, well-funded fintech scaling in a genuinely underserved part of the payments market

Ryft is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of background.