Director Customer Success Engineering

Redpanda Data is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP), a new category in AI infrastructure. They are seeking an experienced engineering leader to build and scale their Customer Success Engineering team, focusing on customer adoption and success with their streaming data platform.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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