Technical Customer Success Manager

OPPORTUNITY StratusGrid delivers a high-trust, high-competence customer experience around cloud optimization, and we're productizing that expertise into our agentic platform, Stratusphere. This role is for a customer-facing operator who can turn cloud optimization from a program customers participate in into a product experience they understand, trust, and use independently. You will be the connective tissue between customers, PE sponsors, Service Delivery, Product, Engineering, and Sales, helping customers onboard successfully, adopt Stratusphere, approve savings opportunities, and realize measurable value faster. Along the way, you'll identify where customers are getting stuck, reduce friction in the approval process, and bring structured field insights back to Product so the platform keeps getting better. This is a hands-on role for someone who is proactive, highly organized, curious about technology, and comfortable navigating ambiguity. The best fit will know how to build trust with executives and project teams alike, anticipate customer needs before they are stated, and turn repeatable customer success motions into scalable systems. RESPONSIBILITIES • Customer Engagement & Relationship Ownership: Serve as the primary point of contact for customers throughout onboarding, active optimization, and ongoing program engagement. Build strong relationships through proactive communication, thoughtful follow-through, and genuine ownership of the customer experience. • Drive Stratusphere Adoption: Help customers understand the purpose of Stratusphere, how to use it, and how it fits into their cloud optimization workflow. Own product demos, user and team setup, dashboard configuration, training, and ongoing enablement so customers are confident using the platform async. • End-to-End Customer Onboarding: Own customer onboarding from kickoff through successful program activation using our documented onboarding process. This includes cloud environment integration coordination, program overview, roles and responsibilities, billing process, common risks, success expectations, user setup, team setup, and customer-facing documentation. When troubleshooting goes beyond the documented steps, bring in a Forward Deployed Engineer to resolve it. • Improve Time to Approval: Partner closely with Service Delivery and customer stakeholders to understand where savings opportunities are getting stuck. Identify approval roadblocks, information gaps, unclear recommendations, stakeholder misalignment, or process friction, then coordinate the right next steps to help customers make decisions faster. • Customer Reporting & Business Reviews: Deliver clear, useful customer reporting, including weekly updates, program success reports, KPI dashboards, savings progress, approval status, engagement trends, and executive-level summaries. Translate product usage and savings activity into business outcomes customers and PE sponsors can understand. • PE Firm Relationship Management: Support and manage reporting cadences with PE firms, sharing portco program successes, challenges, risks, and progress. Navigate the balance between PE firm expectations and portco realities with credibility, judgment, and care. • Voice of the Customer: Capture customer feedback, pain points, objections, feature requests, and recurring patterns from the field. Translate that input into clear, evidence-backed insights for Product, Engineering, and Service Delivery so Stratusphere improves based on real customer needs, not guesswork. • Prototype Testing & Product Feedback: Build lightweight prototypes with AI tools and test product ideas, workflows, messaging, and dashboards with customers. Start the conversation, gather customer goals, and bring in a Forward Deployed Engineer once discussions move into technical requirements and design detail. Report learnings back to Product to inform prioritization and roadmap decisions. • Technical Partnership: Recognize when a customer needs technical depth and bring in the right Forward Deployed Engineer at the right time. Use AI tools as a first line of support for technical questions, and keep the customer informed while engineering works the issue. • Customer Health & Risk Monitoring: Monitor engagement health, approval velocity, product usage, customer satisfaction, and other risk signals. Proactively identify disengagement, slow approvals, unclear ownership, or declining momentum before they become churn risks. • Reduce Customer Effort: Think one step ahead of customers, anticipate where they may need help, and fill gaps before they become blockers. Make it easier for customers to understand opportunities, make decisions, involve the right stakeholders, and realize value. • Customer Education & Documentation: Create and maintain customer-facing documentation, FAQs, onboarding guides, user guides, training materials, and repeatable playbooks that help customers use Stratusphere independently and help StratusGrid scale what works. • AI-Enabled Customer Success: Use AI tools daily to accelerate customer research, reporting, documentation, analysis, workflow design, and communication. Identify recurring work that can be automated, document successful strategies, and help turn repeatable customer success motions into scalable systems. • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Service Delivery, Product, Engineering, Sales, and leadership to coordinate customer actions, escalate risks, share field context, and improve the overall customer experience. Maintain strong operating hygiene in Linear, customer records, dashboards, and internal updates. • Operational Excellence & Follow-Through: Own commitments end to end. Communicate clearly, escalate early, close loops visibly, and ensure customers and internal teams always understand status, next steps, risks, and owners. REQUIREMENTS • Customer-Facing Experience: Proven experience in customer success, account management, implementation, client services, or a similar customer-facing role supporting B2B SaaS, cloud, infrastructure, FinOps, or technical services customers. • Customer Outcome Orientation: Genuine passion for helping customers achieve measurable business outcomes. Ability to stay focused on value realization, adoption, satisfaction, and long-term customer health rather than activity alone. • Executive Communication & Credibility: Ability to communicate effectively with C-suite stakeholders, technical leaders, operating partners, finance teams, and project teams. Comfortable leading discussions with executives and translating technical progress into business impact. • Comfort with Technical Topics: Willing to learn cloud and cost optimization concepts well enough to follow customer conversations, ask good questions, and spot when an engineer is needed. Deep technical expertise isn't required; our Forward Deployed Engineers provide technical depth when customers need it. • Ability to Simplify Complexity: Exceptional ability to explain savings opportunities, cloud optimization tradeoffs, product workflows, and program expectations in plain language without losing accuracy or credibility. • Data & Reporting Capability: Experience interpreting metrics, building or configuring dashboards, identifying trends, and using data to drive customer behavior. Comfortable reporting on adoption, engagement, savings, approval velocity, customer health, and program outcomes. • Product Adoption & Enablement Skills: Demonstrated ability to onboard users, train teams, drive product usage, increase customer independence, and help customers realize value through self-serve or async product workflows. • Problem Solving & Systems Thinking: Strong ability to break down ambiguous customer problems, identify root causes, propose practical solutions, and balance customer needs with operational, product, and engineering constraints. • Relationship Navigation & Judgment: Able to read the room, detect unstated concerns, navigate conflict, and balance the needs of customers, PE sponsors, and internal teams. Strong judgment around when to push, when to support, and when to escalate. • Voice-of-Customer Discipline: Ability to distinguish anecdotes from patterns, gather evidence, test hypotheses, and turn customer feedback into useful product and operational insights. • Prototype & Experimentation Mindset: Comfortable testing early ideas, workflows, messaging, dashboards, or lightweight prototypes with customers and using the results to inform better decisions. • Strong Ownership & Urgency: Track record of proactively driving work forward, following through on commitments, communicating risks early, and operating effectively in fast-moving environments with incomplete information. • AI as a Daily Tool: Demonstrated habit of using AI tools to improve speed, quality, analysis, documentation, communication, and repeatability while maintaining strong judgment and verification. • Remote-Work-Ready: Equipped to work effectively in a distributed team, including a reliable high-speed internet connection, a professional and distraction-limited workspace, and the ability to consistently communicate, collaborate, and execute independently. • Travel: Willingness and ability to travel periodically, as needed, for customer engagements, PE firm meetings, team planning sessions, or onsite work. • Work Authorization: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. This position does not offer visa sponsorship. NICE-TO-HAVE / DIFFERENTIATORS • Experience supporting cloud optimization, FinOps, infrastructure automation, DevOps, platform engineering, or enterprise cloud programs. • Familiarity with AWS and Azure environments, native cost tools, cloud billing concepts, savings opportunities, reservations, Savings Plans, rightsizing, storage optimization, and common cloud cost management workflows. • Experience working with Private Equity firms, PE-backed companies, executive sponsors, finance leaders, or multi-stakeholder enterprise accounts. • Experience building customer health models, adoption dashboards, executive business review materials, NPS programs, G2/review motions, or customer success operating cadences. • Experience using product analytics, telemetry, DAU/WAU/MAU, feature usage, onboarding metrics, time-to-value metrics, or engagement data to improve adoption. • Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering teams to shape roadmap priorities based on customer evidence. • Experience creating scalable customer documentation, onboarding playbooks, FAQs, training materials, internal enablement content, or self-serve product education. • Experience with tools such as Linear, HubSpot, Salesforce, Gainsight, ChurnZero, Looker, Power BI, Tableau, Hex, Metabase, or similar customer, product, and reporting systems. • Strong writing ability, especially for executive updates, customer-facing summaries, technical explanations, success reports, and concise internal handoffs. • Comfort designing lightweight workflows, mockups, dashboards, or prototypes to test customer pain points before product investment. BENEFITS At StratusGrid, we invest in the health, well-being, and growth of our team. We offer competitive pay and a flexible benefits package that supports employees and their families at every stage. Full-time employees receive: • Competitive salary • Medical, dental, and vision insurance • Life insurance and short-term and long-term disability coverage • 401(k) plan • Flexible PTO, paid sick leave, and paid holidays Benefits may vary by location and employment status. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & FAIR CHANCE HIRING StratusGrid is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic pro…