Customer Success Lead at dust in New York

Job description

• Application
• As Dust’s first dedicated US Customer Success leader, you will build the post-sales motion for one of our most important growth markets. You will begin as a player-coach: personally owning a focused portfolio of strategic customers, leading the coordination of CSMs, Deployment Strategists, and Solutions Engineers, and partnering closely with Sales and Product to drive adoption, retention, and expansion.
• You will start close to the customer and close to the work, building conviction about what great post-sales looks like at Dust. You will then turn those learnings into the operating rhythms, segmentation, playbooks, and team needed to scale. This is an opportunity to define how Customer Success works at a fast-growing, AI-native company, not simply inherit an existing process.

Responsibilities

• Own the US customer-success motion
• Define and lead the Customer Success approach for Dust’s US customers.
• Establish how we segment customers and determine the right level of engagement for each account.
• Coordinate CSMs, Deployment Strategists, Solutions Engineers, and other post-sales partners around shared customer outcomes.
• Create the operating rhythms that keep the team aligned on adoption, customer health, renewals, escalations, and expansion.
• Make clear prioritization and resourcing decisions as customer needs evolve.
• Personally own strategic customers
• Manage a focused portfolio of strategic and high-complexity accounts.
• Build trusted relationships with users, champions, technical stakeholders, and executive sponsors.
• Lead customers from deployment through adoption, value realization, renewal, and expansion.
• Develop clear success plans tied to the customer’s business priorities and measurable outcomes.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for high-stakes customer situations.
• Bring firsthand customer context into decisions about product, process, and team priorities.
• Build the US post-sales playbook
• Define what great post-sales delivery looks like across the customer lifecycle.
• Improve the transition from Sales to Customer Success, including handoff quality, stakeholder mapping, use-case definition, and success criteria.
• Identify patterns across accounts and turn what works into repeatable playbooks.
• Create practical approaches to customer health, risk management, executive engagement, adoption, and expansion.
• Use Dust and other AI tools to increase the leverage of the Customer Success team.
• Develop the team
• Coach CSMs and Deployment Strategists to raise the quality of customer work across the board
• Help define the roles, capabilities, and hiring plan required for the next stage of the US post-sales organization.
• Evolve from execution-heavy to strategy-heavy as the team grows building an organization that can operate independently
• Create an environment where people develop faster than they would anywhere else
• Partner cross-functionally with Sales and Product
• Work closely with AEs to align pre- and post-sales motions and unlock expansion opportunities
• Represent the voice of the US customer internally with clarity and conviction
• Surface recurring customer needs and product gaps, and help Product prioritize them.
• Contribute to how Dust thinks about customer value, retention, and growth at a company level.

Requirements

• Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same 3 dimensions. Aptitude, Attitude and Agency.
• Aptitude
• Has been an excellent Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, or Post-Sales Leader, with strong judgment across account strategy, executive communication, discovery, value articulation, adoption planning, stakeholder management, renewal strategy, and expansion.
• Has owned strategic B2B SaaS customers through deployment, adoption, value realization, renewal, and expansion.
• Has led or deeply coordinated multiple post-sales functions, such as Customer Success, deployment, professional services, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed engineering.
• Brings structured judgment to customer segmentation, account prioritization, and resource allocation, balancing customer urgency, strategic value, commercial importance, and team capacity.
• Has built or meaningfully contributed to a Customer Success playbook, operating model, or team in a high-growth environment.
• Is comfortable with technical products and complex customer environments, and can translate between business priorities, product capabilities, and operational execution.
• Uses AI tools actively in their own work and can identify practical ways to create leverage across the Customer Success motion.
• Attitude
• Treats customer outcomes as the north star, not activity metrics, and builds trust through preparation, clarity, follow-through, and honest communication.
• Surfaces risks and difficult information early, and collaborates naturally with Sales, Product, Engineering, and other teams around shared customer outcomes.
• Is comfortable operating in a fluid, cross-functional environment where titles do not determine contribution.
• Develops the people around them through coaching, direct feedback, and example, while maintaining high standards in a rapidly evolving company.
• Agency
• Is willing to stay close to the work, personally own strategic accounts, and engage directly in complex customer situations.
• Can define and build the US post-sales model without waiting for a complete blueprint, turning customer patterns into repeatable processes and playbooks.
• Makes prioritization and resourcing decisions autonomously, balancing customer urgency, strategic value, commercial importance, and team capacity.
• Finds ways to create customer outcomes with limited resources and imperfect information, and treats the player-coach phase as an opportunity to build conviction and organizational leverage.

Skills

Required

• Customer Success Management
• Account Management
• Post-Sales Leadership
• Strategic Account Management
• Executive Communication
• Discovery
• Value Articulation
• Adoption Planning
• Stakeholder Management
• Renewal Strategy
• Expansion Strategy
• Customer Segmentation

Benefits

• Competitive compensation: $260,000–$340,000 OTE
• Significant equity package in a Sequoia-backed startup
• Health insurance for you and your dependents
• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.
• Beautiful office in the heart of SoHo (NYC)
• Opportunity to travel to Paris multiple times a year
• Regular team events and offsites