Staff Customer Success Manager

About Buildkite

At Buildkite, we're on a mission to unblock every developer on the planet by helping developers create faster, test smarter, and innovate beyond limits. Our Scale-Out Delivery Platform is trusted by some of tech's most innovative companies — including Airbnb, Block, Canva, Elastic, Twilio, and Uber. We've rethought how CI/CD should work, building a platform that's fast, reliable, secure, and scales to meet the needs of high-growth tech companies.

Role Description

The Staff Customer Success Manager is a senior individual contributor who operates as both a strategic owner of Buildkite's most complex and strategically critical Enterprise customers AND a leader within the Customer Success function. You set the bar for what excellence looks like in the role, develop the team through mentorship and playbook contribution, and drive cross-functional initiatives that shape how Buildkite delivers post-sale value at scale.

This is a senior IC role with significant function-level responsibility. You operate on the most strategic accounts — typically multi-org, multi-business-unit, multi-million ARR — and your impact extends beyond your own book to the operating model, the team, and Buildkite's external CS posture. We're looking for someone who has done this work before at a top-tier B2B SaaS company and wants to bring that experience to a founding-team environment where their judgment shapes how the function scales. This is an Individual Contributor position.

Your Impact

Strategic Account Leadership

• Account Ownership: Own end-to-end relationships on Buildkite's most strategic accounts — multi-org, multi-BU, and reference-tier customers with significant ARR concentration — as the customer's single accountable partner at Buildkite.
• Value Realization: Drive measurable business outcomes from the Buildkite investment at the scale and complexity that Buildkite's most strategic accounts require — aligning each account's success plan to enterprise-wide engineering and business goals.
• Internal Orchestration: Mobilize the full Buildkite organization — Account Executives, Technical Account Managers, Solutions, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Executive Leadership — across complex multi-stakeholder accounts so the customer experiences one cohesive Buildkite.
• Cadence Design: Right-size engagement on accounts where every stakeholder is senior and every interaction matters — calibrating cadence so the partnership earns its place on the customer's calendar without over-engineering it.
• Strategic Direction: Contribute to the strategic direction of the Customer Success function in partnership with the Director of Customer Success — informing how Buildkite covers, supports, and grows its most important customers.

Executive Influence and Customer Partnership

• C-Suite Engagement: Drive C-suite, CTO, and board-level engagement on customer outcomes and strategic direction — comfortable as the Buildkite executive presence on the account.
• Business Translation: Translate platform investment into board-level business outcomes, in the language the customer's executives use with their own leadership and board.
• Executive Business Reviews: Lead the EBR cadence with the AE and TAM at the executive tier — bringing the value narrative, customer readiness, and forward-looking strategy that keeps the most strategic partnerships on track.
• Customer Advocacy: Amplify the voice of Buildkite's most strategic customers inside Buildkite — ensuring Product, Engineering, and Executive Leadership stay focused on what matters most to the accounts that shape the company's direction.
• Stakeholder Navigation: Navigate the most complex internal and customer organizations — driving consensus, surfacing blockers, and aligning stakeholders at every level to the outcomes the partnership depends on.

Function Leadership and External Posture

• Operating Model Ownership: Set the bar for the function — help define the playbooks, KPIs, success-plan templates, and engagement standards the CS team operates on, and evolve them as the function scales.
• Mentorship and Team Development: Mentor and develop CSMs and Sr. CSMs across the team — raise the bar on judgment, executive engagement, and strategic ownership; help future hires ramp to full strategic ownership of their books.
• Cross-functional Initiatives: Lead cross-functional initiatives across CS, Product, Sales, and Marketing that improve how Buildkite delivers post-sale value — initiatives that outlast your direct ownership of them.
• Risk, Renewal, and Expansion Standard: Set the standard for risk identification, renewal strategy, and expansion sourcing across the team — informing how every CSM on the team thinks about the commercial health of their book.

You're a Strong Fit if You Have

• 8+ years in Customer Success, Strategic Account Management, or post-sale strategic relationship roles at top-tier B2B SaaS companies — with at least 3 years operating at the Sr. CSM level or equivalent
• A track record of owning Buildkite-scale strategic customer relationships — multi-million ARR, complex multi-stakeholder, multi-BU — as the person accountable for value, retention, and expansion
• Exceptional executive presence and communication — C-suite, CTO, and board-level engagement is comfortable and well-practiced, and you translate technical work into the business outcomes their leadership cares about
• Demonstrated impact on team and function — you've built playbooks, mentored teams, and driven cross-functional initiatives that outlasted your direct ownership of them
• Direct experience in CI/CD, DevOps, or developer infrastructure SaaS — deep domain expertise and strong technical fluency, without trying to be the technical expert
• Strong commercial fluency — you understand pricing, packaging, and the economics of named-account coverage, and you operate effectively alongside AEs and Renewals
• Comfort operating as both an IC and a function-leader on the same day — owning a customer relationship in the morning and reshaping the operating model in the afternoon

Nice to Have

• Hands-on familiarity with Buildkite or comparable CI/CD platforms (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Harness, GitLab CI) — enough to navigate a customer's CI/CD architecture conversation without needing translation
• Player/coach experience — formal or informal team leadership in an IC capacity, including line-of-sight responsibility for the development of less-senior CSMs
• Experience leading or shaping a CS function from an early stage at a developer-infrastructure or B2B SaaS company — not just executing within an established one
• Experience partnering with Technical Account Managers or Solutions Architects in a model where the technical and relationship roles are explicitly separated
• Familiarity with CS platforms (Vitally, Catalyst, Gainsight, Totango, or similar) and modern revenue stacks (Salesforce, Avoma, ChartMogul, or equivalent)

Why You'll Love Working at Buildkite

• Remote-first culture and support for work-life balance
• Competitive compensation and benefits package
• Meaningful work alongside some of the most innovative engineering teams in tech
• Opportunities for professional growth, learning, and career development
• A supportive, collaborative team culture where your ideas and expertise matter

Compensation — $160–170K