Senior Customer Success Manager
Tavus · San Francisco
About the Role
Tavus customers are building products and experiences with conversational AI. Getting from a signed contract to a successful deployment takes more than access to the platform. Customers need clear priorities, a workable implementation plan, and a partner who understands what they are trying to accomplish.
You will report to our Customer Lead and take ownership of an existing portfolio of customers, helping them move through implementation, adoption, and renewal. You will run the day-to-day relationship, coordinate technical partners, and keep customer commitments moving.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role with meaningful independence. Your portfolio will include ongoing implementations and established customers between renewal cycles. You will inherit unfinished work, build trust with customers, and establish a clear plan for what happens next.
What you will do
Own your portfolio. Build relationships with the people using, implementing, and buying Tavus. Understand their business objectives, success criteria, decision process, and reasons to renew.
Turn customer goals into working plans. Establish milestones, owners, dependencies, and decision dates. For new customers, work with Sales and Customer Engineering to carry the buying context and agreed scope into onboarding. For existing customers, reconstruct missing context and reset the plan where needed.
Run dependable customer communication. Acknowledge requests, clarify their impact, secure the right internal owner, and set the next update. Keep customers informed when answers or delivery dates change, without requiring them to chase.
Drive adoption and customer value. Identify stalled implementations, weak engagement, and unrealized use cases. Determine whether the constraint is product quality, implementation, customer capacity, sponsorship, or fit, and coordinate a practical intervention.
Prioritize across accounts. Allocate attention using customer impact, revenue, growth potential, urgency, and implementation complexity. Make tradeoffs explicit when competing requests exceed available capacity.
Coordinate technical work. Give Customer Engineering, Support, Product, and Engineering useful context: what the customer is experiencing, what they have tried, what is blocked, and why it matters. Track the work through a verified answer or agreed next step.
Run renewal preparation and execution for assigned accounts. Understand renewal intent early, maintain an evidence-based forecast, develop a recommendation, and coordinate the process through a decision. Partner with the Customer Lead and Sales on negotiation and commercial approvals.
Identify credible expansion opportunities. Connect additional use cases to a buyer, a business outcome, and a feasible deployment path. Bring qualified opportunities to the appropriate commercial owner.
Maintain an actionable account record. Keep the business objective, implementation status, usage, sponsor, risks, commitments, and next decision current. Distinguish progress from completion and customer interest from an agreed commitment.
Improve how we operate. Turn recurring questions and successful interventions into reusable guidance, onboarding practices, and adoption and renewal playbooks. Surface product and documentation gaps with evidence of their customer impact.
How ownership works
You own the relationship, account plan, customer communication, and commercial readiness of your assigned portfolio. You are responsible for keeping work moving across teams and making unresolved decisions visible.
Customer Engineering owns technical implementation and troubleshooting. Product and Engineering own platform fixes and technical readiness. You work closely with those teams to establish owners, communicate confirmed capabilities and limitations, and agree on the next customer checkpoint.
When a request lacks an owner, a credible delivery plan, or an agreed scope, you escalate with the customer impact, options, and decision needed. You are comfortable setting expectations and explaining tradeoffs without promising work another team has not committed to deliver.
You will run routine account decisions independently within agreed priorities and commercial guidelines. Strategic escalations, pricing exceptions, and commitments beyond existing scope are handled with the Customer Lead and the relevant functional owner.
What you bring
Experience independently managing a portfolio of B2B customers through implementation, adoption, and renewal.
Experience with APIs, AI, infrastructure, developer tools, or another technical product where customer implementation materially affects success.
The ability to enter an account with incomplete information, ask focused questions, and establish a coherent plan.
Commercial judgment: you can connect product performance, usage, customer economics, sponsorship, and business value to retention and expansion.
Strong follow-through across several accounts and internal teams. You keep commitments visible and recognize when a stalled next step requires a decision.
Clear writing and sound judgment in difficult customer conversations. You communicate uncertainty honestly, bring bad news early, and adapt the detail to your audience.
Enough technical fluency to understand an integration, gather useful evidence, and work credibly with engineers. Production software development is not a requirement.
Evidence that you can prioritize competing demands, challenge an ineffective proposed solution, and set realistic expectations while maintaining trust.
Comfort improving processes while using them. You can establish useful structure without waiting for a finished playbook.
We care about demonstrated ownership and judgment across these responsibilities. Relevant experience may come from Customer Success, technical account management, implementation, or another customer-facing role with substantial account responsibility.
What success looks like
In your first 30 days, you understand your initial portfolio, meet the key customer and internal stakeholders, and establish the current state of each account. You can explain what the customer wants to achieve, what is blocked, what has been promised, and what happens next. You and the Customer Lead agree on the account handoff, priorities, and escalation boundaries.
By 60 days, you independently run the customer cadence for your assigned accounts. Customers know who owns their relationship and when to expect updates. Active implementations have a shared plan, material risks are visible, and upcoming renewals have a clear recommendation and next steps.
By 90 days, the agreed portfolio has transferred to you:
Routine customer communication and account coordination proceed without the Customer Lead or an Account Executive directing each interaction.
Commitments have named owners and checkpoints; delays and decisions surface before customers need to chase.
Technical issues reach the right team with useful context, and customers receive accurate updates through resolution or an agreed disposition.
Adoption interventions and renewal plans are grounded in customer evidence, with progress and remaining constraints clearly understood.
Recurring problems produce improvements to guidance, handoffs, or operating practices.
The Customer Lead participates through scheduled portfolio reviews and defined escalations, with more capacity for strategic accounts and the broader customer organization.
Why join
You will join a Customer Success organization that is still taking shape, with real customers, meaningful commercial responsibility, and the opportunity to influence how it operates. You will work closely with Sales, Customer Engineering, Product, and Engineering to help customers turn ambitious AI use cases into products they use, value, and continue investing in.
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