Head of Customer Operations

Ultra; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Ultra is seeking a Head of Customer Operations to own all post-signature activity, including field deployment, support, and customer success. You will lead a ~10-person post-sale organization, shaping both operations and strategy to scale with a growing customer base.

You'll drive deployment planning, retention metrics, and a culture of customer excellence, balancing hands-on leadership with strategic initiatives across SMB and Enterprise accounts.

Qualifications

• 7+ years across customer-facing and operational roles.
• Evidence of strategic ownership, not just execution.
• Hands-on deployments in last three years in hardware or field services.

Responsibilities

• Own post-sale operations from deployment to retention.
• Lead deployment planning and delivery for customer deployments.
• Drive down cost-to-serve through scalable tooling and processes.
• Own performance of field deployment and remote operations teams.
• Conduct regular business reviews and align with customer goals.

Skills

Operations leadership

Team building

Strategic planning

Customer success

Deployment management

Stakeholder mgmt

Retention strategy

Tools

WMS

WES

Job description

We are looking for a Head of Customer Operations to own everything that happens after a customer signs. You will inherit Ultra's ~10 person post-sale organization — field deployment, support, and customer success — and build it to match our quickly growing customer base. The role is both operational and strategic: you'll own deployment process as well as retention performance. You do not need to be a technical expert, but you do need to know how to build and lead a team of deployment and support experts while maintaining a culture of excellence that obsesses over the customer experience.

What you'll own

Customer trust and retention

• Own gross retention across SMB and Enterprise accounts; know every customer's economics, risk profile and have a scalable process for tracking their metrics.
• Read sentiment early — act before, not after, a customer is considering contract renewal or expansion
• Understand how to build trust with reliable, consistent communication and performance.
• Run a regular cadence of business reviews with our customers to ensure we are meeting their goals.

Post-sale deployment

• Take full ownership of the deployment from planning to delivery.
• Drive down cost-to-serve through scalable tooling and processes.
• Own performance of our remote teleoperation team and manage their impact on our customer experience.

Fleet performance

• Know how every robot in the fleet is performing relative to KPIs, and hold the org to that standard.
• Use qualitative as well as intervention and fault data to bring the voice of our customers to the hardware and software teams.
• Anticipate where the service model breaks at scale, and fix it before it breaks.

Building the team

• Own the hiring plan; define roles, scorecards, and ramp plans. Run the interview loops yourself.
• Invest in and train your team to consistently surprise and delight our customers.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years across customer-facing and operational roles
• Evidence of strategic ownership, not just execution: you've reshaped a service model, restructured an at-risk project, and made the difficult calls needed to protect long-term relationships
• Recent hands‑on experience in a directly relevant field, you've personally owned accounts and run deployments in the last three years.
• Experience with hardware products and services — robotics, automation, industrial equipment, logistics, or field‑deployed hardware.
• Enterprise credibility: you've sat across from a Fortune 500 operations or procurement leaders and held your ground.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time to customer sites.

Helpful: warehouse fulfillment or 3PL domain experience; WMS/WES integration and enterprise IT review cycles; standing up a customer success or field service tool stack.

Probably not a fit if: your last two roles were purely managerial and you want to stay there; your product experience is entirely software with no hardware; you need mature process and clean data to operate; travel is a dealbreaker.