Founding Customer Success Manager Jobs in Reston, VA

Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise Private Clouds. Founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers, we are dedicated to transforming IT operations. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns your existing hardware into a full-featured, future-ready private cloud. We innovate across what we build and how we deliver it, staying focused on a next-generation, open private cloud while holding ourselves to one standard: exceptional customer outcomes.

As the Senior CSM Lead at Platform9, you own customer success outcomes for our customers and help build the Customer Success function from the ground up. You combine hands-on customer success management (driving adoption, health, retention, and renewal-readiness) with the operational discipline to design the systems and scaled motions that let Customer Success deliver consistently as we grow.

As a founding member of the Customer Success function, you will partner closely with Customer Success leadership to stand up the health and operating model, build the digital-led scaled motion that gives every customer a designed experience, and establish the playbooks and patterns a growing team will run. This is a senior individual-contributor role with a build mandate and a clear path to grow with the function and team you help create.

The Senior CSM Lead works with Platform9 customers and internal teams by providing expertise in the following areas:

• Own customer success outcomes for an assigned portfolio or segment: adoption, customer health, risk intervention, renewal-readiness, and retention.
• Operate the customer success operating model: health scoring, lifecycle stages, portfolio review cadence, and KPI and executive dashboards.
• Establish playbooks, templates, and runbooks that enable scalable, repeatable execution as the team grows.
• Identify churn risk early and drive targeted retention; surface and pursue expansion/whitespace opportunities in partnership with Sales.
• Instrument and report the metrics that matter (time-to-value, customer health, retention/NRR signals) and deliver executive-ready reporting.
• Partner cross-functionally with Support, Sales, Product, and Services to drive customer outcomes and structured product feedback.
• Lead recurring customer touchpoints and business reviews (QBRs/EBRs), translating technical status into business impact.
• Mentor and help grow the Customer Success team as it scales.
• Manage special projects as assigned (onboarding improvements, customer success process design, tooling and reporting).

Core skills:

• Excellent written, verbal, and executive communication; trusted to engage both C-suite and technical stakeholders.
• Strong interpersonal skills and customer-success mindset; ability to build trust and collaborate effectively across internal teams.
• Program and project/portfolio management discipline, comfortable building operating models, governance, escalation frameworks, action plans, and executive-ready status updates.
• Strong aptitude for turning data and signals into action; comfort with dashboards and reporting.
• Leadership, coaching, and team-development capability.

Customer Success and operational expertise (in-depth knowledge in several areas is essential):

• Customer success and account/portfolio management for enterprise or B2B SaaS (adoption, health, lifecycle, renewal-readiness).
• Retention and expansion (early churn-risk identification, whitespace/upsell partnership, NRR/GRR outcomes).
• Building scaled or digital ("tech-touch") customer success motions, including segmentation by complexity, risk, and revenue.
• Customer success operating systems: health scoring, KPI and executive dashboards, escalation governance, and onboarding frameworks.
• Cross-functional and program/PMO delivery methods (Agile, waterfall, and hybrid; risk and dependency management).
• Customer success and delivery tooling (CS platforms, Salesforce, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, Jira, BI/dashboards).
• Sufficient technical familiarity with cloud and infrastructure software to partner credibly with technical customers and internal engineering teams.

Operational expectations:

• Ability to follow standard operating principles and practices (governance, status reporting, documentation, change handling).
• Travel to customer or company sites as necessary.

Responsibility:

• Owns customer success outcomes and contributes to building the customer success operating model, applying senior experience and judgment to ambiguous, build-from-scratch problems. A founding contributor who sets standards and drives cross-team outcomes.

Interaction:

• Works with customer stakeholders up to executive level and internal teams ranging from Staff to Executive leadership.
• Operates with high autonomy; partners with leadership on the customer success operating model; sets direction and mentors as the team forms.

Education and Experience:

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience in Customer Success, program/portfolio management, or service delivery, with demonstrated retention/NRR outcomes and experience building operating models, frameworks, or playbooks. A blend of customer success and program/PMO leadership experience is preferred.
• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent practical experience); an advanced degree is a plus.
• Certifications are a plus, such as PMP, Agile/ACP, CSM (Certified ScrumMaster), or comparable credentials.

Compensation- $150-160k