Senior Customer Success Manager

Senior Customer Success Manager

About the Role

Freestar's publishers need partners who can grow with them - and the Senior CSM role exists for someone who brings that depth. You own a portfolio of Freestar's more complex, higher-stakes publisher relationships, operating with a level of autonomy and strategic influence that goes beyond day-to-day account management.

You've been in this industry long enough to have developed real pattern recognition. You know what good monetization looks like across different publisher types, you can spot a floor pricing problem before it shows up in the numbers, and you've had enough difficult client conversations to navigate them without breaking a sweat. You don't need a playbook for every situation - and when one is missing, you help build it.

This role sits at the intersection of trusted advisor and yield expert. Your publishers should feel like they have a genuine advocate inside Freestar, and your peers should feel like they have a resource they can learn from.

What You'll Do

Publisher Partnership

• Own a portfolio of Freestar's more complex publisher accounts, serving as their primary strategic point of contact
• Lead executive business reviews with a clear point of view - not just a performance recap, but a forward-looking perspective on where the relationship should go
• Build deep, multi-threaded relationships within publisher organizations, spanning revenue, ad ops, product, and editorial
• Anticipate risks and opportunities before they're surfaced by the publisher, and come to every conversation prepared with a recommendation

Yield & Optimization

• Take ownership of performance analysis end-to-end - identifying trends, forming hypotheses, designing tests, and tracking outcomes across your portfolio
• Drive more sophisticated optimization work: auction dynamics, floor pricing strategy, identity and audience approaches, format diversification, and the interplay between user experience and revenue
• Serve as a technical resource for both your publishers and your peers - able to go deep on programmatic mechanics and explain them clearly to any audience
• Collaborate with yield, demand, and product teams on bespoke solutions for accounts with unique needs or meaningful scale

Strategic Growth

• Identify and develop expansion opportunities that are genuinely additive - new products, formats, or services that make sense for each publisher's specific situation
• Contribute meaningfully to renewal conversations, bringing a clear account narrative and commercial instincts to the table
• Flag patterns you're seeing across your portfolio that could inform product development, demand strategy, or CS process improvements

Team Contribution

• Mentor and support junior CSMs, sharing your experience and helping elevate the team's collective standard
• Help build and refine playbooks, QBR templates, and best practices based on what you're learning in your accounts
• Contribute to onboarding and training as a subject matter resource

What We're Looking For

• 5-8 years of experience in customer success, account management, or a publisher-facing role within ad tech or programmatic advertising
• Proven track record managing complex, high-value accounts with multiple stakeholders
• Deep, working knowledge of the programmatic ecosystem - header bidding, floor pricing, auction mechanics, yield optimization, GAM, and identity solutions
• Strong analytical instincts: you're comfortable owning performance analysis independently and turning data into a clear narrative
• Executive presence and communication skills - able to hold a room at the VP or C-suite level without leaning on a script
• A coaching mindset - you share what you know and make the people around you better
• Self-directed and proactive; you manage a complex book without needing to be prompted

Bonus points for:

• Experience on the publisher side - you've sat in the seat your partners are sitting in
• Familiarity with identity and audience solutions (UID2, RampID, first-party data strategies)
• Experience with CMP/consent frameworks and their downstream monetization impact
• Comfort with CS and CRM platforms and using data to manage a book systematically