About the Team
Customer Engineering & Success is where CircleCI’s customer relationships are won, deepened, and renewed. The organization brings together the technical teams that help customers succeed with CircleCI at every stage, from the first proof-of-concept through enterprise-wide adoption and long-term partnership. It includes four groups:
- Field Engineering, which partners with Sales on technical discovery, solution design, and proofs-of-concept, and advises high-touch accounts after the sale.
- Technical Success Management, which guides strategic, enterprise, and commercial customers to adoption, value, and expansion.
- Digital Customer Success, which serves SMB customers through a scaled, data-driven engagement model.
- Support Engineering, which resolves complex technical issues for customers around the world, around the clock.
The team works across North America, Europe, and Japan and serves engineering organizations at companies of every size. CircleCI processes more than a million builds a day, so this team sees how the world’s best engineering teams ship software. It turns that insight into better outcomes for customers and a stronger product. Its work drives retention, expansion, and revenue directly.
About the Role
Reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer, the VP of Customer Engineering & Success leads CircleCI’s full technical customer journey, from pre-sales technical wins through adoption, support, renewal, and expansion. You’ll unite field engineering, technical success, digital success, and support engineering into one connected motion, so customers get a consistent and expert experience no matter how they engage with us.
Success in this role means higher net revenue retention, lower churn, faster time-to-value, and stronger technical win rates. It also means an organization that scales efficiently through the right mix of high-touch, pooled, and digital engagement. You’ll be the voice of the customer at the executive table and shape product priorities, go-to-market strategy, and the annual plan with insight drawn directly from how customers use CircleCI.
What You’ll Do:
- Set the vision, strategy, and operating model for a global organization spanning Field Engineering, Technical Success Management, Digital Customer Success, and Support Engineering, and integrate pre-sales and post-sales technical engagement into one seamless customer journey.
- Own retention and expansion outcomes, including gross and net revenue retention, churn reduction, and adoption, and partner with Sales leadership to drive technical wins and land-and-expand growth.
- Build a coverage model that matches customer segment to engagement type (high-touch, pooled, and digital/scaled), and use data and automation to scale efficiently as the customer base grows.
- Lead, develop, and retain a high-performing team of senior leaders and individual contributors across North America, EMEA, and APAC, and build strong succession and career paths.
- Establish the metrics, health scoring, forecasting, and operating rhythms that give the business clear visibility into customer health, support performance, and team productivity.
- Serve as the executive voice of the customer, working closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to influence the roadmap, improve the product experience, and align company priorities with customer needs.
What You’ll Bring:
- 15+ years of experience in customer success, solutions or field engineering, technical support, or other technical customer-facing leadership roles, primarily at B2B SaaS companies
- 10+ years leading leaders, including multi-function organizations that combine both pre-sales and post-sales technical teams
- Proven track record owning and improving gross and net revenue retention, churn, and expansion metrics at scale
- Experience building and scaling global teams across multiple regions and time zones, including follow-the-sun support operations
- Hands-on experience designing segmented customer engagement models (high-touch, pooled, and digital/scaled) and the tooling and data infrastructure behind them
- Strong technical foundation in software development, DevOps practices, CI/CD, and cloud technologies, credible enough to engage directly with customer engineering leaders
- 10+ years developing go-to-market strategies tied to annual planning and quarterly execution, including headcount and budget ownership
- Experience working at the executive level in a matrixed environment to influence Product, Engineering, and Sales priorities
Bonus Skills (Nice to Have)
- Experience in DevOps, CI/CD, developer tools, or platform engineering companies
- Background leading organizations through a merger of functions (for example, combining pre-sales engineering and post-sales success teams under one leader)
- Experience with consumption- or usage-based pricing models and the adoption and expansion motions that go with them
- Experience building or scaling a professional services or paid technical advisory offering
- Experience using AI and automation to scale customer engagement, support deflection, or health monitoring
- Customer success leadership in a high-growth or post-restructure environment where you built new motions from the ground up
