Director Customer Success Engineering

Redpanda Data is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) in AI infrastructure. The Director of Customer Success Engineering will lead a team to ensure successful adoption and scaling of Redpanda's streaming data platform through team development, operational excellence, and effective customer engagement.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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