Customer Success Manager

Client Success Manager, Transparency

Light Labs · Austin, TX (in-person) · Full-time

Reports to: General Manager, Transparency

Compensation: Top decile & meaningful equity

About Light Labs

The food industry runs on trust, and almost none of it is verified. Brands make claims. Consumers cross their fingers. The testing that’s supposed to hold everyone accountable is stuck in the era of phone quotes, mailed samples, and PDFs nobody reads.

We’re fixing that. Light Labs is the trust layer for consumer products. We’re a tech-enabled, ISO 17025-accredited testing lab that turns results around in ~3 days instead of the industry’s 7–14, and our Product Insight Panel (PIP) puts verified test results right on a brand’s product page for every shopper to see. Think “Consumer Reports for what’s actually in your products.”

Brands like AG1, Momentous, Equip Foods, Grüns, Bobbie, and Lineage already use us to prove what’s in the bottle. We’re founded by Nick Mares (CEO, who previously co-founded Kettle & Fire) and Vijay Manohar (CPO, previously at Samsara), backed by 8VC and Valor Equity Partners, and growing fast, with 6x volume growth this year. We work in the open, move fast, and hold a high bar. We’re just getting started building the products that make radical transparency the industry standard.

About the Co-Founders

Nick Mares: 2x founder, Kettle & Fire and Upside Financing. Kettle & Fire is a $200M million/year brand while Upside Financing exited in 2022. He’s raised more than $100M across the two companies and been both in the CEO and COO roles. Nick is a Thiel Fellow.

Vijay Manohar: growth and GTM leader. He helped Samsara scale to be one of the fastest growing B2B software companies ever to reach $1B ARR, including an IPO (NYSE: IOT). B.S. in computer engineering from UT Austin.

The Role

Our Transparency business is exploding, and every new client deserves an experience that makes them a fan for life. That’s your job.

You’ll be the first dedicated Client Success Manager for our Transparency Suite; the human who owns the relationship from the moment a brand signs. You’ll onboard them, keep them close, roll out every new product we ship, and make sure they never have a reason to leave. This is a high-touch, high-trust role: when an Account Executive closes a Transparency client, they’ll hand the relationship to you, and you’ll run with it.

It’s not a traditional sales role, but make no mistake, every conversation you have is quietly a reason for that client to stay. As AI gets better, more brands will ask, “Why can’t I just build this myself?” Your answer is what keeps them with us, built on our mission, our data, and our roadmap. You’ll need charisma, obsessive follow-through, and genuine belief in why transparency matters.

You do not need any lab or product-testing background. We’ll teach you everything about the science. We’re hiring for the person, not the résumé.

What You’ll Own

• Deliver an 11-star onboarding experience. From the handoff call onward, make every new Transparency client feel like the most important brand we’ve ever worked with. Product setup, website integration, COA intake, first results: all handled with a level of care that makes them tell their friends.
• Keep every relationship warm and churn risk low. Check in with your book of business on a regular cadence. How’s their business doing? What do they need next? Where can we add value? You want problems to surface as conversations, not cancellations.
• Own the software migration. As we roll out new versions of our platform (including the PIP v2 rebuild), you’re the person who guides every existing client through the upgrade smoothly, with zero disruption to what’s live on their site.
• Roll out the full Transparency Suite to existing accounts. As we ship new tools (Amazon carousel images, co-branded paid ads, transparency landing pages, co-brand emails, QR codes), you’ll bring them to the right clients at the right moment, expanding how much of each brand’s catalog lives on our platform.
• Be the voice of the customer to Product. You’re closest to what clients love, struggle with, and wish existed. You’ll route those learnings back to our product team so the roadmap reflects reality on the ground.
• Run the numbers and report them weekly. You’ll own a weekly readout on account health, migration status across the client base, churn and retention signals, and expansion opportunities, so leadership always knows where every account stands.
• Spot the testing opportunity and pass the ball. You’re not a tester or a hunter, but you’ll notice when a Transparency client is ready for more, and you’ll tee up a warm handoff to our testing experts (Account Executives).
• Automate the grunt work, then build your own team. You’ll automate the repetitive parts of this job with AI, write the SOPs no one’s written yet, and as volume grows, help hire and lead the Client Success Managers who come after you.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: You know our product cold, you’ve shadowed onboarding and customer calls, and you’ve taken ownership of your first live accounts.
• First 90 days: New clients are onboarded end-to-end without hand-holding, you have a repeatable check-in cadence running across the book, and your weekly account-health report is the source of truth leadership trusts.
• Ongoing: Churn stays low, clients expand into more of the Transparency Suite and testing, migrations land smoothly, and Product ships things because you surfaced them.

What We’re Looking For

• A customer-facing track record. You’ve worked directly with customers before, ideally in customer success, account management, or hands-on customer service. People consistently walked away from you happy.
• Charisma, on camera and in writing. You’re genuinely great one-on-one. You can build rapport fast, read a room on a video call, and make people feel taken care of. Light Labs was built on relationships, and you get why.
• A fanatic, borderline-obsessive attention to detail. You catch the thing everyone else misses. You’d rather over-check than let a client see something sloppy.
• Startup DNA and total ownership. No ego, no 9-to-5 mentality, no waiting to be told what to do. When you spot a hole, you fill it. When you’re handed a brand, we never worry it’ll get dropped.
• You’re AI-native, and you build your own tools. You use AI every day, and you’re the type to automate a task rather than grind through it manually. You’re comfortable building your own workflows and automations in Claude / Claude Cowork to move faster than anyone around you. (If you don’t already, you’re itching to.)
• Relentless over email and Slack. Clients and teammates hear back from you fast and clearly. You’re responsive to a fault.
• You’re married to the mission. You actually care about making the food system more transparent, and you can sell that “why” because you believe it.

Values We Care About

We believe that how we work is just as important as what we achieve. Light Labs’ culture is built on principles that drive high performance:

• First Principles
  • We’re looking for team members who can deal with ambiguity, deconstruct problems, and build the optimal solution.
  • Question every requirement → Delete any part or process you can → Simplify and optimize → Accelerate cycle time → Automate.
• Standard of Excellence:
  • High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent.
  • There’s a glut of mediocrity in the world. We’re chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.
• Bias for Action:
  • Take initiative, make decisions quickly, and have a willingness to experiment and learn from failures
  • Customer expectations are not static. They rise over time, which means we have to continuously improve every single day
• Low Ego:
  • Coachability; it’s not about being right, it’s about getting to the right answer.
  • Reacts calmly to criticism or negative feedback, and has a “feedback is an opportunity for information and improvement” mindset
  • Respectfully challenges decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable. Once a decision is made, even if you still disagree, commit wholly and move forward.

Bonus Points

• Prior account management or customer success experience in B2B SaaS.
• Experience with Shopify or D2C brands.
• Some design sense. Enough taste to prompt AI into client-ready assets (e.g. landing pages, product detail page carousel images, ad creative, etc.) and know when something looks off.
• Experience being the first or early CS hire somewhere, building process from scratch.
• Include the word sunlight somewhere in your Loom video to prove you read this.
• Comfort with CRM and support tooling (we run HubSpot, Pylon, Slack, Superhuman).

The Details

1. Location: In-person, at our Austin office. This role is built on face-to-face trust and same-day responsiveness. It’s not remote.
2. Reports to: General Manager, Transparency.
3. Benefits: Health, dental, and vision coverage; paid time off; the AI tools and hardware you need to do the best work of your career; and a front-row seat as we build a category.

How to Apply

We care about attention to detail, so the application is designed to show it off.

Send us:

1. An email with the subject line “Application for: CSM, Transparency” and a short note on why the mission of transparency matters to you.
2. Include a link to a 93 second Loom answering two questions: (a) Tell us about a time you turned a frustrated or at-risk customer into a happy one. (b) Show or describe one workflow you’ve automated with AI to save yourself time.

To apply, email [email protected]

We read every application from a real human, and a real human will get back to you.

Light Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We may use AI tools to help review applications, but every hiring decision is made by a person.