Senior Customer Success Engineer San Francisco, CA

Altruist; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare and dental insurance

401k savings plan with a 4% match

16 weeks paid parental leave

Work from anywhere policy (one month)

Professional growth opportunities

Job summary

Altruist is seeking a Customer Success Engineer to enhance our Customer Success team's effectiveness using AI. This role requires designing and building AI agents and automations, ensuring they optimize key customer interactions such as onboarding and support.

The successful candidate will possess a software engineering background with a customer-centric mindset, bringing 5-8 years of experience and a focus on delivering impactful solutions. This position embraces a hybrid work model with offices located in San Francisco, CA.

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years software engineering background with production experience.
• Genuine obsession with improving customer experience.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding assistants and LLMs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and iterate on AI agents and applications.
• Scope and prioritize what to build based on customer impact.
• Collaborate closely with CS leadership to understand pain points.

Skills

Software engineering background

Strong product instincts

Customer experience focus

Proficiency in Python

Building with LLMs

Tools

Salesforce

Python frameworks

Job description

Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients.

We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you!

But first, our values

Kindness - Kindness doesn’t just equal niceness. We listen to understand. We embrace, and encourage healthy debate and diverse perspectives. We approach conflict openly, honestly, and respectfully.

Brilliance - Humility is the skill we’re most proud of and possessing a growth mindset is always top of mind. We take ownership in everything we touch; regularly using our unique superpowers to reach a common goal as a team. We succeed and fail as one.

Grit - When challenges arise, we stay laser focused on achieving our mission and finding a way forward, even when it’s hard. We are nimble and maintain a sense of urgency, swiftly adapting to change and overcoming obstacles.

The opportunity

We're hiring a Customer Success Engineer to sit at the intersection of AI innovation and customer operations. This isn't a traditional engineering role — it's a mission-critical position dedicated to one thing: making our Customer Success team dramatically more effective through the power of AI. Our mission is to make financial advice more affordable and accessible — and that depends on a Customer Success function that scales through intelligence, not headcount. You'll spend the majority of your time designing and shipping AI agents, automations, and internal tools — with a product manager's instinct for what's worth building and a CX obsession for how it feels to use. That means building intelligent onboarding flows, self-service support experiences, and proactive engagement tools that users interact with every day. This role is for someone who is deeply technical, product-minded, and moves fast in an Agile environment. You think like an engineer, an operator, and a PM all at once — opinionated about tooling, obsessive about customer experience, and pragmatic about the tradeoffs that keep our team lean and our mission within reach.

*This is hybrid role, requiring three days per week in our San Francisco, Culver City, or Dallas office.

Your impact

• Design, build, and iterate on AI agents and applications — both internal tools that automate workflows for the Customer Success team and customer-facing experiences that optimize key moments in the journey (onboarding, self-service support, proactive engagement).
• Scope and prioritize what to build — look at a messy list of requests and identify the highest-leverage opportunity rather than just building what's asked.
• Think from the customer's perspective first — whether building internal tools or customer-facing experiences, consider how real people will interact with what you build and iterate based on their feedback.
• Define success before shipping — set clear metrics, track adoption and outcomes, and use data to validate whether a tool is actually moving the needle.
• Understand the business context behind the work — reason about cost-to-serve, efficiency tradeoffs, and ROI, and use that lens to make better decisions about what to build and how.
• Own the technical decisions end-to-end — select the right LLMs, orchestration frameworks, and third-party tools for each use case, and write clean, maintainable code (leveraging AI-assisted development) that ships quickly without sacrificing reliability.
• Partner with DevOps and Security to ensure AI agents and applications are deployed reliably, meet security and compliance standards, and are built with production-grade infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with CS leadership and frontline team members to deeply understand pain points and translate them into high-impact solutions.
• Drive adoption and scalability — run demos and training sessions to onboard users onto new tools, and establish best practices, playbooks, and documentation so solutions stick.

What you bring

• 5–8+ years software engineering background with production experience building and shipping systems.
• A proven track record of owning outcomes, not just outputs — someone who prioritizes ruthlessly, holds themselves accountable to results, and doesn't consider something shipped until it’s working in the hands of users.
• Strong product instincts — comfortable looking at a messy list of requests and identifying the highest-leverage opportunity, defining what "done" means, and saying no to work that won't move the needle.
• Genuine obsession with customer experience — you think about how real people (advisors, internal teams) will interact with what you build, and you iterate based on their feedback rather than assumptions.
• Comfort reasoning about cost-to-serve, efficiency tradeoffs, and ROI — you make decisions about what to build and how based on business impact, not just technical interest.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern language (Python preferred), comfort picking up new frameworks quickly, and fluency with AI coding assistants — using them to ship more, faster, without sacrificing reliability or code quality.
• Hands‑on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open-source), agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, or similar), and a strong intuition for prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and the practical limits of AI in production — including how to evaluate tools and models on cost, latency, accuracy, and maintainability tradeoffs.
• Deep comfort with APIs, webhooks, and integration patterns, plus experience working with messy real-world data and transforming it into clean, reliable pipelines.
• Comfortable working with CRM platforms (we use Salesforce, including Service Cloud and Experience Cloud) or confident ramping up quickly. Prior Salesforce experience (Apex, Flow, or Salesforce APIs) is a strong bonus.
• Self‑directed and proactive — you identify opportunities, propose solutions, and drive them to completion without heavy oversight, even through initial ambiguity.

What we bring

Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.

• A hybrid work schedule for most positions to promote strong, in‑person collaboration.
• Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.
• Competitive pay and equity for eligible positions.
• Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
• 401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
• 16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.
• Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
• Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).
• Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home‑purchasing preparedness, etc.).
• One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).

Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with equity in the form of Stock Options (ISOs) for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our pay bands. Base salaries will be reviewed at regular intervals throughout the year, typically in conjunction with performance review cycles. By evaluating compensation on a regular basis, we are able to reward high performance and ensure all employees have opportunities for growth.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Altruist we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.