Director of Customer Success [EMEA]

Lumaai; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Lumaai is seeking a hands-on, senior leader to head the EMEA Customer Success organization from London. You will lead a small team of senior CSMs and scale to 10 in the next year, while staying deeply involved with the region's most strategic accounts.

You'll own hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management, turning individual practices into a scalable operating system with robust account planning, escalation, and reporting structures across EMEA.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Customer Success or closely related client-facing function with team leadership responsibility.
• Proven track record building and developing CS teams with retention and growth of reports.
• Experience holding senior relationships at large enterprise or agency accounts, including challenging conversations.
• Demonstrated ability to systematize work and create repeatable processes.
• Strong operational leadership and ability to own outcome metrics beyond activity metrics.

Responsibilities

• Lead the EMEA Customer Success team, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance management, and career development for senior CSMs.
• Maintain senior relationships in the region and intervene on strategic accounts as needed.
• Decide where the team should focus time and which initiatives to standardize versus customize.
• Develop account planning, escalation, and reporting processes to scale with headcount growth.
• Own performance outcomes such as net revenue retention, renewal rates, health scores, and escalation resolution for the accounts covered.
• Drive usage growth across more teams, markets, and use cases in existing accounts.

Skills

Customer Success leadership

People management

Executive stakeholder management

Senior enterprise relationships

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

CRM platforms

Job description

This is a hands-on leadership role at the center of our EMEA Customer Success organization.

You'll lead a small, senior team of 5 with the intention to double to 10 in the next 12 months.

Based from London, your team sit locally along with a growing team in Munich and possibly Riyadh in future working with enterprise customers across EMEA.

Where You Come InYou'll carry formal accountability for your team’s performance, development, hiring, and day-to-day effectiveness — and you’ll stay personally engaged in the region’s most strategic accounts, at the level where a senior voice changes the outcome. Your core mandate is to turn a set of excellent individual practices into one operating system: the account planning, escalation, and reporting structures that let the team scale without a proportional rise in headcount.

This fits someone who wants to lead from close range rather than inherit a large, already-built org. If you’re looking for a defined playbook or a steady renewal book to protect, this isn’t that — you’ll be building the playbook as you go.

What You’ll Own

• Lead the EMEA Customer Success team — owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance management, and career development for a small group of senior CSMs.
• Stay personally engaged in the region’s most strategic accounts, holding senior relationships directly and stepping in when a situation needs a decision at your level.
• Decide where the team’s time goes: which accounts warrant depth, what account enablement work is worth the investment, and what should become a repeatable, templated motion versus a bespoke one-off.
• Build the account planning, escalation, and reporting processes that let the team absorb more enterprise customers without adding headcount at the same rate.
• Own performance outcomes for the accounts the team covers — net revenue retention, retention rates, health score distribution, and escalation resolution — and report cleanly to leadership.
• Grow usage inside existing accounts — across more teams, more markets, and more use cases
• Partner cross-functionally with Sales on renewals and new-account expansion, with Forward Deployed Creatives on workflow adoption, and with Product on what customers in the region need built next.
• Identify and develop talent — building a bench of strong individual contributors and emerging player-coaches who can grow with the organization.
• Lead hiring for the team as it scales, setting an explicit bar for what "senior" looks like in EMEA Customer Success.
• Set and maintain a high standard of execution across the team: account health, CRM hygiene, renewal management, expansion identification, and customer engagement quality.
• Serve as a senior point of escalation for complex customer situations that have exceeded what the team can resolve independently.
• Contribute to CS strategy alongside regional and functional leadership — bringing a ground-level view of team capability, customer patterns, and operational gaps into planning conversations.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of experience in Customer Success or a closely related client-facing function, including substantial experience leading teams of senior individual contributors (not only early-career CSMs) with direct accountability for performance outcomes.
• A proven people manager — you’ve built and developed CS teams, navigated performance conversations with directness and care, and have a track record of retention and growth among your reports.
• A record of personally holding senior relationships at large enterprise or agency accounts, including the conversations that go badly.
• Evidence you’ve made a team’s work repeatable — you’ve taken a function running on effort and given it a system, and can say what you cut to get there.
• Strong operational leader — you build reliable execution systems, hold teams to consistent standards, and are comfortable owning outcome metrics rather than just activity metrics.
• Presence — you can lead people who already know their job well, in a region removed from headquarters, and earn their respect quickly while holding your own point of view.
• Comfortable operating across multiple markets within the region while working closely with a leadership team based elsewhere.
• Effective cross-functional partner — you work well with Sales, Product, and GTM leaders and understand how CS fits into the broader revenue motion.
• Comfortable operating in a scaling environment where team structure, tooling, and process are still being refined — you improve the system rather than waiting for it to be finished.

What Sets You Apart

• Experience building or significantly scaling a CS function at a high-growth startup — including hiring, process development, and team structure design.
• Fluency with marketers — real time spent working with advertising agencies or brand marketing teams, whether from a software vendor, a media owner, an ad tech or martech company, or from inside an agency or brand.
• Background at a creative technology, generative AI, or product-led growth company.
• Track record of developing CS managers or leads from IC backgrounds — not just hiring experienced managers externally.
• Deep familiarity with CRM and customer success tooling, and a point of view on how to use data to manage team performance.

Nice to Have

• An additional European language.
• Experience at a creative software, martech, or ad tech company selling into agency groups and global brands.
• Familiarity with adjacent, newly-opened markets relevant to the region’s growth (e.g. the Middle East).