Director Customer Success Engineering

About the Role:  

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build and scale our Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team at Redpanda. You'll lead a team of Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects who ensure our customers successfully adopt and scale with Redpanda's streaming data platform.

This is a leadership-first role. You need to be technical enough to hire exceptional talent, coach your team through complex customer engagements, and credibly represent CSE in product and engineering discussions. But your primary impact will come through team development, process excellence, and operational leverage—not being the most technical person in every room.

Our CSE model is built on precision and leverage, not long-term embedded engagements. We deliver customer success through focused, high-impact interactions paired with reusable assets that scale our expertise. Rather than solving the same problem repeatedly for individual customers, we invest in creating content, reference architectures, and self-service resources that enable hundreds of customers to succeed independently. Think: targeted workshops and architecture sessions that accelerate time-to-value, combined with blogs, videos, documentation, and blueprints that customers can apply on their own.

We work closely with pre-sales to understand opportunities early and ensure smooth handoffs from evaluation to production. And while we're primarily focused on technical enablement today, we're building the foundation for potential professional services offerings as we scale—so experience thinking about services evolution and monetization is valuable.

You Will:  

Build and lead the team

• Hire, develop, and retain world-class Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects across different customer segments
• Create career frameworks and growth paths that attract and retain top technical talent
• Coach your team through complex customer engagements, helping them develop judgment on when to go deep vs. when to scale
• Build processes and playbooks that create leverage—turning one-off solutions into repeatable patterns and reusable assets
• Partner with Customer Success Management and Sales to align on account strategy, coverage models, and opportunity pipeline
• Drive operational excellence through metrics, forecasting, and resource allocation across Tier 1/2/3 customers
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, customer-first mindset, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with pre-sales teams to ensure technical win strategies translate into successful customer outcomes

Maintain technical credibility

• Stay current on streaming platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and emerging technologies like agentic AI to evaluate candidates and coach your team effectively
• Participate in strategic customer conversations where executive-level technical leadership matters
• Represent CSE in product roadmap discussions, translating customer needs into actionable feedback
• Review and guide complex solution architectures, proof-of-concept designs, and reference implementations
• Keep pace with Redpanda's product capabilities—including innovations like the Agentic Data Plane—competitive landscape, and streaming ecosystem

Drive scalable customer impact

• Champion the shift from one-off problem solving to creating reusable content and self-service resources
• Build programs that multiply team impact: office hours, webinars, technical content series, solution blueprints
• Ensure the team balances short-term precision engagements with building long-term leverage through documentation and enablement
• Think strategically about how CSE capabilities could evolve into professional services offerings as the business scales

You Have: 

Leadership experience

• 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Architecture, Forward Deployed Engineering, Professional Services, or Customer Success Engineering
• 3+ years leading and developing technical teams, ideally in high-growth B2B SaaS or infrastructure software
• Track record of scaling teams and processes as organizations grow—experience leading traditional SA teams or forward deployed engineering organizations particularly relevant
• Experience building coverage models that balance high-touch relationships with scaled programs
• Comfort operating in a player-coach capacity when needed, but primarily focused on multiplying impact through your team
• Understanding of the demands of working in a startup environment
• Customer-first mindset with ability to balance customer advocacy with business priorities

Technical foundation

• Solid background in distributed systems (e.g. Kafka, streaming platforms, databases, Spark, Hadoop, etc.) sufficient to hire and coach effectively
• Understanding of modern cloud architectures (AWS, GCP, Azure) and deployment patterns
• Ability to have credible technical conversations with senior customer architects and engineers
• Experience with technical content creation, enablement, and knowledge management
• Familiarity with enterprise software sales cycles and how technical teams fit into customer journey from pre-sales through production
• Adaptability to grasp emerging technologies and translate them into customer value—experience with AI/ML infrastructure or agentic systems a plus

Operating style

• Data-driven approach to team performance, customer health, and resource allocation
• Bias toward creating leverage through content, programs, and repeatable processes rather than one-to-one consulting
• Collaborative partner to Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success Management
• Comfortable with ambiguity and building structures in a fast-moving environment
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for both internal and customer-facing contexts
• Ability to think strategically about services evolution, including potential paths to professional services offerings

Nice to Have: 

• Experience with open-source business models and community-led growth
• Background in streaming data platforms, real-time analytics, event-driven or big data / distributed architectures
• Prior experience in customer success operations or go-to-market analytics
• Experience building or evolving professional services organizations

U.S. base salary range for this role is $250,000, not including bonus and/or commission. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. As a remote-first company, we strive to consider each candidate's job-related skills, location, experience, relevant education or training to determine individual base salary. Your talent partner will share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.