Customer Success Growth Leader

BackStory; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Performance bonus

Benefits

Job summary

Backstory, headquartered in San Francisco, seeks a Director of Customer Success to lead a growing CS organization and own retention and consumption across the customer base. You’ll manage 1–2 managers and 8–12 CSMs, aligning cross-functional teams to drive value and expansion while ensuring production-grade use of Backstory across customers.

You’ll collaborate with Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Studio, and Product, running CS on Backstory itself to demonstrate what the

Qualifications

• 12+ years in Customer Success or post-sales leadership, including 5+ years leading teams and developing managers.
• Track record of owning retention and expansion outcomes in B2B SaaS.
• Experience building segmentation, capacity models, playbooks and metrics that scale, and running a function from data in Salesforce, Gainsight or similar.
• Hands-on experience designing success planning, EBR and value frameworks for enterprise customers, and translating product usage into outcomes executives care about.
• The ability to find the problem beneath a feature request, build from existing capabilities, and know when to say no, scope down or elevate with a recommendation.
• Strong product intuition: you learn a product quickly, spot patterns across customers, and turn them into credible product demand.
• Executive presence with C-level customer stakeholders and senior internal leaders, including negotiating and influencing on high-stakes decisions
• A proven partnership record with Sales, Services, Support and Product.
• You use Claude and other leading AI tools in your own work, understand agentic workflows and MCP-based integrations, and have a clear point of view on how AI is changing the CS role
• You learn a system before you change it, take feedback well, and can disagree and commit

Responsibilities

• Own retention and consumption; drive gross retention, expansion and credit consumption, and lead customers onto the Backstory platform.
• Give leadership a weekly view of renewal risk, and run save motions with direct executive engagement.
• Run three coverage models: high-touch strategic, time-boxed emerging, and scaled, moving emerging accounts into strategic coverage within their renewal cycle.
• Own account alignment, book economics, capacity planning, and the playbooks that take accounts from data platform adoption to deployed use cases.
• Understand each strategic customer's business, technical environment, and what our product can become for them.
• Trace every request to an agreed problem statement and measurable outcome, and own the value realization framework (success plans, executive readouts, EBRs).
• Hire, develop and retain managers and CSMs, with a bench ready for larger books and new segments.
• Build solution instinct across the team: spot the architecture under a request, gather context before engaging technical teams, and see it through.
• Own onboarding and ramp, career paths and performance standards.
• Own weekly renewal reviews, segment account reviews, monthly business reviews and quarterly planning.
• Maintain the metrics and dashboards behind them, and manage budget, staffing and process.
• Run CS on Backstory, from account plans and health signals to renewal reviews and customer prep.
• Lead forums where CSMs share their platform workflows, and turn daily use into product input.
• Own the Sales to CS relationship, from handoff standards to joint renewal and expansion planning.
• Coordinate with Professional Services, Technical Support and Studio on strategic accounts.
• Bring the customer's voice into product and go-to-market planning, and support references, stories and Marketing's advisory programs.

Skills

Customer success

Team leadership

Retention & expansion

Cross-functional collaboration

Sales & CS alignment

Data-driven decisions

Product & GTM collaboration

Claude AI/tools

Tools

Salesforce

Gainsight

Job description

Backstory, headquartered in San Francisco, seeks a Director of Customer Success to lead a growing CS organization and own retention and consumption across the customer base. You’ll manage 1–2 managers and 8–12 CSMs, aligning cross-functional teams to drive value and expansion while ensuring production-grade use of Backstory across customers.

You’ll collaborate with Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Studio, and Product, running CS on Backstory itself to demonstrate what the