Customer Success Architect - OpenObserve

About OpenObserve

OpenObserve is a rapidly growing, developer-forward observability platform designed for modern, high-scale systems. We empower engineering teams to ship faster and improve reliability by simplifying logs, metrics, and traces, making them faster and significantly more cost-efficient. Our cloud-native architecture and intelligent indexing provide real-time insights without the typical complexity or escalating costs.

We are backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. Our open-source project boasts over 22,000 GitHub stars and 10,000 active deployments. Our customer base includes some of the world's largest engineering organizations, who choose OpenObserve to unify observability, reduce spend, and accelerate incident response.

Our culture is deeply product-obsessed, customer-driven, and emphasizes high ownership. We operate with agility, value clarity, and provide our team members with the autonomy to pursue ambitious goals.

About the Role

Reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, you will take ownership of the customer's technical journey with OpenObserve, starting even before the contract is signed. You will collaborate with sales during proofs of concept, guide pilots through to full deployment, and ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes with OpenObserve, fostering long-term retention.

This is a highly technical position. Our customers are primarily platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leaders, many of whom are migrating from incumbent solutions like Datadog, Splunk, or Elastic. They will expect you to comprehend their architectural landscape, actively engage with the product, and possess a clear vision for effective observability.

This role is an excellent fit if you have a background in engineering, SRE, or support, and have discovered that your greatest satisfaction comes from collaborating with the users of the technology you build. You will remain hands-on with the technology and dedicate most of your week to customer interactions. We will provide coaching on the commercial aspects of the role.

It is crucial to note that this is not a support role. Support is reactive—addressing, fixing, and closing tickets. Success, in contrast, is proactive: understanding customer objectives, identifying potential deviations, and intervening before issues are explicitly raised. While you will work closely with support and engineering and manage escalations, your primary objective is not ticket resolution, but achieving successful customer outcomes.

What Success Looks Like

After twelve months, four key achievements will define your success:

1. Customer Retention and Growth: Your customers renew, and the majority are ingesting more data than when you began. Retention and growth within your portfolio serve as your primary performance indicators.
2. Pilot to Deployment Conversion: Customers who began with a Proof of Concept (POC) are now in full production, having successfully transitioned from their previous tools, all within the agreed timeline.
3. Proactive Problem Solving: You identify potential issues before the customer does, such as a drop in usage, a key champion departing, or a team failing to onboard. You detect these signs and take corrective action.
4. Function Enhancement: The Customer Success function is improved beyond its initial state. Onboarding processes, health scoring methodologies, and business review frameworks are documented and repeatable, enabling future hires to start with a strong foundation.

What You'll Own

• POCs and Pilots: Participate in evaluations before contract signing. Partner with the account executive to define success criteria, facilitate customer data ingestion, and ensure the pilot effectively demonstrates its value.
• Pilot to Full Deployment: Guide customers from a successful pilot phase to full-scale production. Plan the transition from their existing tools, establish data sources, pipelines, dashboards, and alerts, and maintain project timelines.
• Adoption and Outcomes: Develop a tailored success plan for each account, aligned with the customer's key priorities, whether that's cost reduction, improved incident response time, or enhanced coverage. Monitor usage and health metrics, and act on early warning signals.
• Technical Guidance: Conduct reviews of architecture, ingestion strategies, data retention policies, and query performance. Recommend necessary changes and demonstrate solutions directly within the product, rather than through presentations.
• Relationships: Cultivate trust with the engineers who use OpenObserve daily and with the leaders who made the purchasing decision. Conduct business reviews that customers genuinely value attending.
• Renewals and Expansion: Take ownership of, or partner with sales on, customer renewals. Identify expansion opportunities when new teams, data sources, or use cases emerge, and collaborate with the account executive to close these opportunities.
• Escalations: In the event of an issue, coordinate with support and engineering teams and keep the customer informed. You are responsible for the customer's overall experience, even when you are not directly implementing the fix.
• Voice of the Customer: Synthesize recurring patterns and feedback from your accounts and communicate them to product and engineering teams with sufficient detail for actionable insights.
• The Playbook: Develop POC templates, onboarding guides, migration runbooks, and training content to streamline processes and accelerate success for future customers.

We're Looking for Someone Who

The most effective individuals in this role embody a blend of engineer, consultant, and diplomat. They can troubleshoot an ingestion pipeline in the morning and guide a frustrated VP through a renewal discussion in the afternoon, demonstrating interest in both aspects.

• Has 4+ years in a technical role such as software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering, and desires to increase their customer-facing time. Prior customer success or technical account management experience is a plus, but not a prerequisite.
• Possesses genuine observability experience. You have hands-on experience using, operating, or supporting tools like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic, and you hold informed opinions on what constitutes effective monitoring.
• Is technically credible with engineers. You are proficient with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, and log, metric, and trace pipelines. You can write SQL, interpret configuration files, and independently reproduce problems before escalating them.
• Understands the distinction between support and success. Your week's productivity is not measured by tickets closed, but by the progress your customers make towards their strategic objectives.
• Demonstrates high emotional intelligence. You can discern underlying frustration in a polite email. You recognize when an engineer seeks a direct answer versus when an executive requires reassurance. You can deliver challenging news without becoming defensive or losing the audience's trust.
• Is intelligent and curious. You are driven to understand why something works, not just that it does. You will delve into a customer's technology stack out of genuine interest and rapidly acquire new technical knowledge.
• Communicates clearly, both in writing and verbally, with hands-on engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Possesses commercial acumen, or is eager to develop it. While prior experience owning renewals is not required, you are curious about business operations and can differentiate an expansion opportunity from a mere request.
• Is highly organized. You can effectively manage a portfolio of accounts and concurrently handle multiple evaluations and migrations without oversight.
• Thrives in early-stage environments. You are comfortable with ambiguity and prefer to build processes rather than inherit established ones.

What We Offer

• Impact: An early and influential position in customer success, with direct access to the CRO and significant influence over how we acquire, onboard, retain, and grow our customer base.
• A Path Toward Customers: If transitioning from an engineering role, you will receive coaching from the CRO on customer engagement and commercial strategies, while maintaining a strong connection to the technology.
• Compensation: A competitive base salary, a bonus structure tied to retention and growth, and meaningful equity.
• Product: An open-source-rooted product featuring clear technical differentiation and a highly satisfied customer base. You will represent a product you can genuinely be proud of.
• Benefits: Comprehensive benefits, a flexible work schedule, and unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO).
• Growth: Clear career paths to senior and principal architect roles, or to leading the team as we expand.

Location

Remote, United States. Timezone overlap for core collaboration hours is required; occasional travel for customer visits, events, and team offsites will be necessary.