Founding Customer Success Manager

About Artie

Artie is a fully-managed real-time data streaming platform that replicates production databases into data warehouses and lakes - in real time, with zero maintenance. We make high-volume data replication simple, reliable, and scalable for engineering teams.

Our platform powers mission-critical use cases including fraud and risk monitoring, inventory visibility, customer-facing analytics, and AI/ML workloads.

We’re trusted by teams like Substack, Alloy, and ClickUp, and raised a Series A from top-tier investors including Standard Capital, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Pathlight, and the founders of Dropbox and Mode.

Artie is built for engineers who care about performance, reliability, and operational simplicity - and we’re growing fast.

About the role

We're hiring a Founding Customer Success Manager to own every customer after the contract is signed: onboarding, adoption, renewals, and growing the account.

Today our founders and engineers run post-sales themselves. Our customers love the product and the responsiveness, but at our size that model doesn't scale, and customers deserve one person who owns both their outcome and their commercial relationship. That person is you.

This role is half trusted advisor, half account owner. Our customers are data engineers and platform leads running Artie in production, where a stale table or a missing row matters. You'll be technical enough to diagnose most issues yourself, and commercial enough to carry a renewal and expansion number, negotiate contracts, and run expansion deals end to end. You'll work directly with our founders, sales, and engineering, and set the bar for every CSM and account manager who comes after you.

What you'll do

Own the customer from signature to renewal

Be the primary point of contact for your book of accounts, from kickoff through renewal and expansion

Run onboarding: kickoff calls, internal prep with Engineering, onboarding trackers, and a clear path to first production pipelines

Set up a regular review cadence with key accounts and use it to learn what Artie powers for them and what's next on their roadmap

Keep customers healthy and get ahead of risk

Build and maintain account health views (usage, pipeline status, open issues, stakeholder coverage) using our data and AI tools

Troubleshoot most customer issues yourself (replication lag, schema changes, connector config) and pull in Engineering when it's needed

When something does go wrong, own the customer side of the incident: a clear timeline, a plain explanation of root cause, and what will prevent it next time

Own renewals

Run every renewal starting three months out: usage review, pricing, terms, and the conversation itself

Forecast renewals accurately in our CRM and flag risk early, well before the renewal date

Negotiate contract terms, multi-year commitments, and price changes, and work through customer procurement and security reviews

Manage and grow your accounts

Carry a renewal and expansion number for your book of business

Build account plans for top accounts: who the stakeholders are, what Artie powers today, and where it could go next

Multi-thread beyond the day-to-day engineers to data leaders, platform owners, and budget holders

Find and close expansion end to end: new databases, new teams, new use cases, and higher-volume tiers, from scoping and pricing through proposal and signature

Partner with Account Executives on the handoff into onboarding, and on larger expansions that look like new deals

Keep billing clean: invoicing contacts, AWS Marketplace private offers, and follow-up on overdue invoices

Turn happy customers into references, case studies, and referrals

Be the voice of the customer

Track customer feature requests and engineering workstreams, with clear priority and owners

Bring patterns from the field to Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap

Build the CS function

Turn our existing playbook into repeatable processes for onboarding, health scoring, QBRs, renewals, and escalations

Define the metrics we run on (GRR, NRR, time to first pipeline, CSAT) and report on them

Use AI to automate the manual work, so one CSM can cover far more than one CSM usually does

What we're looking for

4+ years in Customer Success, Account Management, or Technical Account Management at a B2B SaaS company, ideally in data infrastructure or developer tools

You've carried a renewal and expansion number for a book of business and can point to your GRR, NRR, or expansion results

You've negotiated renewals and expansions yourself: pricing, multi-year terms, procurement, and security reviews

You keep an honest forecast. Your CRM reflects reality, and nobody is surprised by a churn or a slipped renewal

Comfortable building relationships from the hands-on engineer up to the VP or CTO who signs the contract

Technical depth to earn a data engineer's trust: comfortable with SQL, at least one relational database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server), and at least one cloud warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift)

You can read a log, reproduce a problem, and write a bug report an engineer can act on without a follow-up call

Calm and direct in an escalation. You'd rather send a clear, honest update today than a perfect one next week

Builder's instinct: comfortable with ambiguity at an early-stage startup, where process is something you create, not something handed to you

Willing to work in-person, 5 days/week at our SF office (relocation covered)

Bonus points

Familiarity with change data capture, Kafka, or replication tools like Fivetran, AWS DMS, Debezium, or Airbyte

Experience with usage-based or tiered pricing, and with selling through AWS Marketplace

You were an early or first CS or account management hire and built the function

You use AI tools (Claude and similar) to build dashboards, automate follow-ups, and get more done

Compensation & benefits

170k-220k OTE. 80/20 Split

Equity in the company: every employee is an owner

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO, plus all federal holidays and sick leave

401(k) with employer contribution

$200/month wellness & commuter stipend

$500/year learning & development allowance

Free lunch, dinner, and snacks in the office

Visa sponsorship available

This is a full-time, in-person role at our San Francisco office in the Financial District.