[Remote] Director, Customer Success

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Backstory is seeking a Director of Customer Success to lead its CS organization and own customer retention, expansion, and consumption. The role builds segmented customer motions, develops the team and operating rhythm, drives value realization, and partners across Sales, Services, Support, Studio, and Product.

Responsibilities

• Drive gross retention, expansion and credit consumption, and lead customers onto the Backstory platform
• Give leadership a weekly view of renewal risk, and run save motions with direct executive engagement
• Run three coverage models: high-touch strategic, time-boxed emerging, and scaled, moving emerging accounts into strategic coverage within their renewal cycle
• Own account alignment, book economics, capacity planning, and the playbooks that take accounts from data platform adoption to deployed use cases
• Understand each strategic customer's business, technical environment, and what our product can become for them
• Trace every request to an agreed problem statement and measurable outcome, and own the value realization framework (success plans, executive readouts, EBRs)
• Hire, develop and retain managers and CSMs, with a bench ready for larger books and new segments
• Build solution instinct across the team: spot the architecture under a request, gather context before engaging technical teams, and see it through
• Own onboarding and ramp, career paths and performance standards
• Own weekly renewal reviews, segment account reviews, monthly business reviews and quarterly planning
• Maintain the metrics and dashboards behind them, and manage budget, staffing and process
• Run CS on Backstory, from account plans and health signals to renewal reviews and customer prep
• Lead forums where CSMs share their platform workflows, and turn daily use into product input
• Own the Sales to CS relationship, from handoff standards to joint renewal and expansion planning
• Coordinate with Professional Services, Technical Support and Studio on strategic accounts
• Bring the customer's voice into product and go-to-market planning, and support references, stories and Marketing's advisory programs

Skills

• 12+ years in Customer Success, Account Management or post-sales leadership, including 5+ years leading teams and developing managers
• A track record of owning retention and expansion outcomes in B2B SaaS
• Experience building segmentation, capacity models, playbooks and metrics that scale, and running a function from data in Salesforce, Gainsight or similar
• Hands-on experience designing success planning, EBR and value frameworks for enterprise customers, and translating product usage into outcomes executives care about
• The ability to find the problem beneath a feature request, build from existing capabilities, and know when to say no, scope down or escalate with a recommendation
• Strong product intuition: you learn a product quickly, spot patterns across customers, and turn them into credible product demand
• Executive presence with C-level customer stakeholders and senior internal leaders, including negotiating and influencing on high-stakes decisions
• A proven partnership record with Sales, Services, Support and Product
• You use Claude and other leading AI tools in your own work, understand agentic workflows and MCP-based integrations, and have a clear point of view on how AI is changing the CS role
• You learn a system before you change it, take feedback well, and can disagree and commit
• Experience leading customers through usage-based or consumption pricing, and tying variable consumption back to delivered value

Benefits

• Regular employees may be eligible for commissions or bonus programs (target included in OTE)
• Regular employees may be eligible for equity

Company Overview