About this Customer Success Manager role at OpenObserve Inc.
About us
OpenObserve is a fast-growing, developer-forward observability platform built for modern, high-scale systems. We help engineering teams ship faster and sleep better by making logs, metrics, and traces simpler, faster, and far more cost-efficient. A cloud-native architecture and smart indexing deliver real-time insight without the usual complexity or runaway costs.
We're backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. The open-source project has more than 22K GitHub stars and 10K active deployments, and our customers include some of the largest engineering organizations in the world. They choose OpenObserve to unify observability, cut spend, and speed up incident response.
Our culture is product-obsessed, customer-driven, and high ownership. We move quickly, value clarity, and give people room to take big swings.
About the role
Reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, you'll own the customer's technical journey with OpenObserve, and it starts before the contract is signed. You'll work alongside sales during proofs of concept, take pilots through to full deployment, and then make sure customers get what they bought OpenObserve for and stay with us for years.
This is a technical role. Our customers are platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leaders, many of them mid-migration from Datadog, Splunk, or Elastic. They'll expect you to understand their architecture, get your hands into the product, and have an opinion about what good observability looks like.
It's a good fit if you come from engineering, SRE, or support and have found that the part of the job you like most is working with the people who use what you build. You'll keep your hands in the technology and spend most of your week with customers. We'll coach you on the commercial side.
It is also not a support role, and the difference matters to us. Support is reactive: a ticket comes in, it gets fixed, it gets closed. Success is proactive: you know what the customer is trying to achieve, you notice when they're drifting away from it, and you act before they have to ask. You'll work closely with support and engineering and you'll own escalations, but your job isn't to close tickets. It's the outcome.
OTE: $140K–$170K (80/20 split), plus equity.
What success looks like
Twelve months in, four things are true:
Your customers renew, and most are sending more data than when you started. Retention and growth in your portfolio are the scoreboard.
Pilots become deployments. Customers who started with a POC are in full production and off their incumbent, on the timeline they were promised.
You see problems before the customer does. A drop in usage, a champion who left, a team that never onboarded. You caught it and did something about it.
The function is better than you found it. Onboarding, health scoring, and business reviews are documented and repeatable, so the next person we hire starts ahead.
What you'll own
POCs and pilots: Join evaluations before the contract is signed. Work with the account executive to agree success criteria, get the customer's data flowing, and make sure the pilot proves what it needs to prove.
Pilot to full deployment: Take customers from a successful pilot to production at full scale. Plan the cutover from their existing tools, get data sources, pipelines, dashboards, and alerts in place, and keep the project on schedule.
Adoption and outcomes: Build a success plan for each account tied to what the customer cares about, whether that's cost, incident response time, or coverage. Track usage and health, and act on early warning signs.
Technical guidance: Review architecture, ingestion, retention, and query performance. Recommend what to change and show them how, in the product, not on a slide.
Relationships: Build trust with the engineers who use OpenObserve every day and with the leaders who signed for it. Run business reviews people want to attend.
Renewals and expansion: Own or partner with sales on renewals. Spot expansion when a new team, data source, or use case appears, and work with the account executive to close it.
Escalations: When something breaks, coordinate support and engineering and keep the customer informed. You own the customer's experience even when you don't own the fix.
Voice of the customer: Bring patterns from your accounts to product and engineering, with enough detail that they can act on them.
The playbook: Write the POC templates, onboarding guides, migration runbooks, and training content that make the next customer faster than the last.
We're looking for someone who
The best people in this job are part engineer, part consultant, part diplomat. They can debug an ingestion pipeline in the morning and talk a frustrated VP through a renewal in the afternoon, and they're interested in both.
Has 4+ years in a technical role such as software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering, and wants to spend more of the week with customers. Prior customer success or technical account management experience is a plus, not a requirement.
Has real observability experience. You've used, run, or supported tools like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic, and you have opinions about what good monitoring looks like.
Is technical enough to be credible with engineers. You're comfortable with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, and log, metric, and trace pipelines. You can write SQL, read a config file, and reproduce a problem yourself before you escalate it.
Understands the difference between support and success. You don't measure your week in tickets closed. You measure it in whether your customers are getting closer to what they set out to do.
Has high emotional intelligence. You hear the frustration under a polite email. You know when an engineer wants an answer and when an executive wants reassurance. You can deliver bad news without getting defensive and without losing the room.
Is smart and curious. You want to know why something works, not just that it does. You'll dig into a customer's stack because you find it interesting, and you learn new technology fast.
Communicates clearly, in writing and in person, with hands-on engineers and with executives.
Has commercial sense, or wants to build it. You don't need to have owned a renewal before, but you're curious about how the business side works and can tell an expansion opportunity from a favor.
Is organized. You can run a portfolio of accounts and several evaluations and migrations at once without dropping things.
Thrives in early-stage environments. You're comfortable with ambiguity and would rather build the process than inherit it.
What we offer
Impact: An early seat in customer success, with direct access to the CRO and real influence on how we win, onboard, retain, and grow customers.
A path toward customers: If you're coming from an engineering role, you'll get coaching from the CRO on the customer and commercial side while staying close to the technology.
Compensation: Competitive base, bonus tied to retention and growth, and meaningful equity.
Product: An open-source-rooted product with clear technical differentiation and customers who love it. You'll be representing something you can be proud of.
Benefits: Full benefits, flexible schedule, and unlimited PTO.
Growth: Paths to senior and strategic customer success, solutions architecture, or leading the team as we scale.
Location
Remote, United States. Timezone overlap for core collaboration hours required; occasional travel for customer visits, events, and team offsites.
