Technical Customer Success Manager

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 10%-25%

Role Description: 

At Defense Unicorns, we don't do average. We build software for high-stakes environments, and our customers need more than a check-in-once-a-quarter CSM — they need a technical partner who can go deep, move fast, and keep calm when things get hard. You'll be embedded with customers, helping them get real value from our platform, partnering with our engineers when things get exciting, and making sure every account you own is set up to grow. Technical enough to hold your own in the weeds, strategic enough to run an executive review. If that sounds like your kind of work, you'll fit right in with our team of Unicorns.

Responsibilities:

As the main point of contact for key accounts, you will build strong relationships with leadership and technical teams to ensure they are getting the most from the platform. You will act as a strategic advisor together with our engineers, helping customers navigate their platform and requirements while solving any roadblocks they encounter. By deeply understanding their goals, you will ensure long-term success, driving high adoption rates and identifying opportunities to grow the partnership.

Mission & Account Ownership:

• Serve as the primary post-sales success lead for assigned commercial accounts
• Build trusted relationships with executive leadership, engineering teams, and technical stakeholders
• Develop and execute outcome-aligned success plans for our customers
• Lead Quarterly/Executive Reviews focused on platform value, operational readiness, and customer outcomes
• Proactively identify adoption gaps, risks, and expansion opportunities

Technical Advisory & Enablement:

• Assist customers on Kubernetes-based platform architecture questions 
• Guide customers through secure software delivery principles and complex deployment requirements
• Advise on CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and modern software delivery practices
• Troubleshoot complex deployment challenges in partnership with Engineering
• Articulate customer requirements related to compliance, security, and regulatory frameworks

Growth & Expansion:

• Identify renewal & expansion opportunities across our customer base
• Drive deeper platform adoption across development teams

Success Metrics:

• Platform adoption across customer accounts
• Renewal and expansion within assigned accounts
• Time-to-operational capability
• Customer health and satisfaction
• Successful platform deployments and time-to-value

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned or discovered based on the evolving needs of the organization. The successful candidate is a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. You will be expected not just to fill gaps as they arise, but proactively identify and take ownership of gaps to drive toward new processes and solutions.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; the ability to effectively interact with Heroes, stakeholders, and team members at all levels of the organization and across all Departments 
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively adapt communication behaviors and tactics to improve working relationships and optimize customer outcomes
• Exceptional problem-solving and decision-making abilities, with a strategic mindset 
• Experience transitioning customer value delivery from services to productized approaches
• Experience and comfort facilitating cross-department problem solving exercises that drive business insights and turn inputs into decisions
• Experience supporting business initiatives across functional areas to inform business strategy and evolution
• Experience with day to day systems like: Hubspot, Github, Unthread (support ticketing) & Notion
• Familiarity with regulated, high-compliance, or constrained deployment environments (a plus)
• Experience working with platform engineering teams
• Background in cloud-native technologies (AWS, Azure, on-prem Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with open-source ecosystems