Customer Success Manager - OpenObserve

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, starting before the contract is signed. You'll work alongside sales during proofs of concept, take pilots through to full deployment, and ensure customers realize value and stay long-term.

This is a hands-on technical role. Our customers are platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leaders—many mid-migration from Datadog, Splunk, or Elastic. They expect you to understand their architecture, dig into the product, and have a clear perspective on modern observability.

This role is well-suited for someone coming from engineering, SRE, or support engineering who enjoys working directly with end users. You will stay close to the technology, spend most of your time with customers, and receive active coaching on the commercial side.

Note: This is not a reactive support role. Customer success is proactive: understanding objectives, spotting drift, and driving outcomes.

What Success Looks Like

Twelve months in, you will have achieved:

• Retention and Growth: Your customers renew, and most send more data than when you started.
• Production Rollouts: Customers who started with a POC are in full production and migrated off incumbents on schedule.
• Proactive Management: You spot usage drops, stakeholder departures, or onboarding gaps and address them ahead of time.
• Repeatable Playbooks: Onboarding, health scoring, and business reviews are systematized and documented for future team members.

What You'll Own

• POCs and Pilots: Join pre-sales evaluations, align on success criteria with account executives, establish data ingestion, and validate proof points.
• Full Deployment: Guide customers from pilot to production, planning cutovers from legacy tools and configuring pipelines, dashboards, and alerts.
• Adoption and Health: Develop tailored success plans focused on customer KPIs (cost, incident response, coverage) and track leading health indicators.
• Technical Guidance: Review ingestion, retention, architecture, and query performance directly within the product.
• Relationship Management: Build trust with hands-on engineers and executive sponsors; conduct impactful business reviews.
• Renewals and Expansion: Own or partner on renewals, identify new expansion opportunities across teams or data sources, and collaborate with sales to close them.
• Escalations: Coordinate with engineering and support during incidents, owning customer communication and experience.
• Product Feedback: Synthesize technical customer requirements and patterns for the product and engineering teams.
• Playbooks: Author POC templates, migration runbooks, onboarding documentation, and technical training materials.

Requirements

• 4+ years in a technical role such as software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering, with a desire to focus on customer-facing work (prior CSM/TAM experience is a plus, not required).
• Hands-on observability experience with platforms like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic.
• Strong technical foundation: Comfortable with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, log/metric/trace pipelines, writing SQL, and reading config files to reproduce issues independently.
• Proactive mindset: Focused on customer outcomes and value attainment rather than ticket counts.
• High emotional intelligence: Skilled at reading between the lines, addressing concerns diplomatically, and managing critical conversations with technical and executive audiences.
• Clear communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills across all organizational levels.
• Commercial awareness: Interest in renewals, account expansion dynamics, and SaaS business models.
• Early-stage agility: Comfortable navigating ambiguity and building operational processes from scratch.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary with bonus tied to retention/growth ($140K–$170K OTE, 80/20 split) and meaningful equity.
• Direct mentorship from the CRO on commercial strategy and executive relationship management.
• High-impact visibility in an open-source-rooted, fast-growing company.
• Comprehensive benefits, flexible scheduling, and unlimited PTO.
• Defined career advancement paths into senior/strategic CS, solutions architecture, or leadership.