Senior Customer Success Manager - Germany

Chainguard; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Chainguard is seeking a Customer Success Manager to serve as the post-sales primary contact for customers, leading onboarding, implementation, and adoption. You will work with Solutions Architects, Technical Support, Product Management, Engineering and Sales to ensure successful onboarding and ongoing support for your customers.

You will own customer engagements across value realization, training, and advocacy, building relationships with stakeholders from technicians to CISOs while driving

Qualifications

• 5+ years in enterprise, customer-facing roles collaborating with technical and business teams.
• Ability to own a customer portfolio with autonomy and make escalations to execs as needed.
• Strong commitment to continuous personal and professional development.

Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding, implementation, and adoption for Chainguard customers.
• Collaborate with Solutions Architects, Technical Support, Product Management, Engineering and Sales.
• Advocate for customer needs and ensure timely resolution of issues.
• Develop hands-on product knowledge and educate customers on features and security principles.
• Manage relationships with stakeholders from technicians to CISOs and drive renewals.

Skills

Customer Success

Relationship management

Strategic thinking

Autonomy

Emotional intelligence

Job description

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

The role, in a nutshell:

As a Customer Success Manager at Chainguard, you will be the post-sales primary point of contact for our customers. You will be responsible for taking lead on customer engagements across onboarding, implementation, and adoption. In this role, you will work closely with Solutions Architects, Technical Support, Product Management, Engineering and Sales to ensure the successful onboarding and support of your customers. You are their day-to-day contact, building relationships with customers and driving outcomes, adoption, and delivering time-to-value.

What you’ll do:

• Success Planning & Value: Drive business success planning by partnering with customers, pre-sales, and post-sales teams to align on requirements, goals, and challenges. Provide thought leadership on change management for large, scaled rollouts. Support the full Business Value Realization cycle to ensure customers can demonstrate and prove value internally.
• Customer Advocacy: Act as the voice of the customer within the organization, advocating for customer needs and requirements to internal teams. This means being a team player and having strong collaboration skills - this role must align with many different internal teams, influence them to act toward customer needs.
• Issue Management: Collaborate with Technical Support and Customer Engineering teams to ensure timely resolution to customer issues.
• Product Expertise: Develop hands-on technical knowledge of Chainguard and stay up-to-date with industry trends, new features, and best practices so you can help customers optimize their use of Chainguard.
• Training & Education: Collaborate with customers and our Edu team to ensure customers are educated on product features, best practices, and security principles.
• Account Management: Develop relationships with multiple levels of customer stakeholders from technicians to CISOs. Work closely with sales teams to identify the best path to renew and expand customers while minimizing churn risks.

What we're looking for:

• 5+ years experience in enterprise, customer facing roles collaborating with both technical and business teams - Customer Success, Professional Services, Technical Account Management or a combination of those plus Sales, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Support.
• Relevant domain knowledge of one or more of the following: Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security infrastructure, containers, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle.
• This is a strategic and proactive role, our expectation is that this person will take full ownership of their customer portfolio and act with a high level of autonomy. This includes making key decisions to drive effective customer outcomes; deciding when to include our executive team or c-suite in customer escalations, how to de-risk or de-escalate customer issues and conflict, and advocating to internal teams including sales, product, engineering, etc.
• An entrepreneurial mindset - you will be often build entirely new process or practices to ensure we best serve customers.
• Demonstrates a strong commitment to continuous personal and professional development, actively seeking opportunities to enhance skills, expand knowledge, and advance within their career and field.
• Driven, high emotional intelligence, and strong priority management skills

Strongly Preferred:

• Previous early-stage startup experience
• Passion for technology & cybersecurity
• Relevant hands-on technical experience, in one or more of the following domains: cloud computing environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), containers, Linux, Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security, security infrastructure, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle

About Us

We live and breathe our company values:

• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to