Customer Success Lead

The opportunity

Okteto is the developer platform for teams building on Kubernetes. We help platform engineering teams give their developers and agents fast, reproducible cloud development environments, and we're at an inflection point.

We have ~40 accounts, a product our customers love, and a real opportunity to deepen those relationships, expand usage, and turn reactive support into a proactive customer success program. What we don't have yet is someone whose job is to own that.

This is a founding CS role. You'll report directly to the CEO and work alongside two Solutions Architects as a tightly integrated team, and work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Sales. Your job is to build the program and execute, not to grow an org. Build out of a team will be dependent on the success of the program at current scale, and upon our performance as a company..

This is a 70% IC / 30% leadership role. The AE team owns the transaction between Okteto and the customer. You own the delivery of value,, communication of that value, the health of the account and the resulting growth.

Success in this role means deeply understanding customer pain, translating business needs into measurable outcomes, and ensuring customers realize the full value of Okteto’s technology.

Your team

You'll work with two Solutions Architects who today handle demos, POCs, and customer support. They're technically strong but have been operating without dedicated management or a structured CS framework. Part of your job is to coach them, build their customer-facing skills, and create clear ownership lanes so the team operates proactively rather than reactively. You'll be part of any future decisions about team structure or headcount, but the goal is depth, not size.

What you'll own

The CS program - build it, run it

• Design and implement the CS function from the ground up: health scoring, onboarding playbooks, QBR cadence, escalation paths, tooling
• Own the health of all ~40 accounts. Know where each one stands at all times: risk, expansion potential, satisfaction
• Track and manage the metrics that matter (NRR, time-to-value, churn rate, expansion pipeline) and report on them clearly
• Define escalation standards: what information is required before routing issues to Engineering or Product, severity classification, and SLA expectations
• Maintain strong account visibility and renewal forecast confidence
• Apply MEDDICC principles to strengthen account strategy and visibility

Account strategy and execution

• Understand customer goals, pain points, and success criteria
• Translate business challenges into actionable success plans using Okteto solutions
• Proactively monitor customer health and risk signals
• Identify churn risks early and lead mitigation plans
• Build a prioritization system so you and the team spend time where it moves the needle
• Work with Sales and SAs on account strategy for complex or high-value accounts
• Drive expansion by identifying where customers are using one feature and helping them get broader value from the platform

QBR Leadership & Executive Engagement

• Own Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) for key customers
• Present business value, product adoption, roadmap alignment, and next-step strategy
• Engage executive stakeholders to reinforce partnership and long-term value
• Use data and insights to tell a compelling customer success story

Implementations and onboarding

• Lead or directly run technical onboarding for new customers
• Prescribe best practices for using Okteto applications effectively
• Build repeatable onboarding playbooks so the experience is consistent regardless of who executes it
• Define measurable onboarding milestones and time-to-value benchmarks

Product feedback loop

• Serve as the structured voice of the customer into product. Patterns you see across accounts — friction points, missing features, workflow gaps — should directly inform the roadmap
• Build a consistent process for capturing and surfacing customer insights, not just escalating one-off requests
• Partner closely with product on prioritization by connecting customer signal to business impact
• This is a real growth opportunity: the best CS leaders at the next stage of a company are the ones who can translate customer reality into product direction

Team leadership

• Mentor, grow and manage the two SAs day to day — clear expectations, regular feedback, smart prioritization, performance management

• Participate in decisions about team structure and future hiring

• Invest in developing the team's customer-facing skills, particularly around proactive outreach, discovery, executive communication, and information gathering quality before escalation

• Define the operating model between CS and SA functions: who owns what for pre-sale versus post-sale, and how handoffs work

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  What success looks like

  In 60 days

  • You've shipped v1 of a customer health framework
  • You've met every account. You can call the health of the top 15 accurately.
  • Onboarding for the next 3 customers runs through a documented playbook
  • You've established a regular management cadence with the SA team (1:1s, team syncs, account reviews)

  In 6 months

  • NRR is up. Churn is down. You can show the work.
  • There is a repeatable CS motion — onboarding, QBRs, renewals, expansion — and the team runs it
  • At least 3–5 accounts have meaningfully expanded usage
  • The SA team has clearer lanes and is operating more proactively
  • Product is receiving regular, structured customer insight from the CS function

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  What we're looking for

  Technical credibility (non-negotiable)

  • You can hold a substantive conversation with platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leads
  • Experience with Kubernetes, microservices architecture, and developer tooling
  • Familiarity with AI-native development workflows is a strong plus. This is where our customers and product are heading

  CS program experience

  • Highly consultative and prescriptive with customers
  • You've built or formalized a CS program at a technical B2B company. We don't have this expertise in-house, we need you to bring it.
  • You have demonstrable experience ensuring customers follow best practices - leading the customer not following them
  • You've personally owned a broad book of accounts, SMB through enterprise, and know how to prioritize and tier attention systematically

  Product partnership

  • You understand that CS at a product-led company is not just retention, it's intelligence. You've fed customer insight into product in a structured way and can show what that looks like in practice.

  The right profile

  • You're a builder who's also a doer. You want to be in accounts and designing systems simultaneously.
  • You're effective working within a small, integrated team rather than building one around you
  • You communicate well in writing , our customers and our company are global and async-first
  • You've worked with technical buyers (platform engineers, VP Eng, CTOs) and can adapt your approach across levels
  • You have experience managing technical teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management and team culture building with distributed teams across time zones.