Founding Customer Success Manager
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 4, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 28, 2026. Artie scores B on the Alion truth index.
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.