Sr. Manager, Technical Customer Success

Port

$125K — $150K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in a technical, customer-facing role at a SaaS company.
  • 3+ years managing technical, customer-facing teams.
  • Solid technical foundation in DevOps, platform engineering, and cloud-native environments.
  • Experience building practical customer success programs and frameworks.
  • Data-driven approach to team management with defined metrics.
  • Strong commercial instincts related to retention and expansion in enterprise SaaS.
  • Excellent communication skills for various audiences.

Responsibilities

  • Manage and develop a team of 8 Technical Customer Success Managers.
  • Build a team culture focused on high standards and customer care.
  • Recruit for team growth while facilitating quick onboarding for new hires.
  • Create clear career paths to encourage staff retention and growth.
  • Continuously improve operational playbooks covering vital processes.
  • Define metrics for team and portfolio health and make informed decisions.
  • Engage directly with key accounts during critical periods or renewals.

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity options.
  • Full benefits package provided.
  • Hybrid work schedule with in-office days in Austin, TX or Boston, MA.
  • Opportunity to work with a product that engineers appreciate.
  • Supportive leadership prioritizing customer success as a strategic focus.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Manager, Technical Customer Success. In this role, you will own how the team performs, grows, and operates, reporting directly to the VP of Customer Experience. We have 8 Technical Customer Success Managers working with enterprise and mid-market engineering organizations across the US. They are sharp, technically credible, and do work with customers who have high expectations. Now we need someone to make the whole team better.

We are building toward a team of 12, and you will be central to making that growth work. This is not a job for someone who manages from a distance. You will know your team's accounts. You will coach people through difficult conversations and complicated situations. You will step in when something needs senior judgment. And you will spend quality time thinking about the bigger picture: where risks are building across the portfolio, what is slowing the team down, and how to build programs and processes that hold up as we scale. We are looking for someone with strong technical instincts, experience leading customer-facing teams, and a commercial mindset. Someone who genuinely cares about developing the people around them. If that sounds like you, keep reading.

What You Will Do

People Leadership
• Manage and develop a team of 8 TSMs, with direct responsibility for their performance, growth, and day-to-day experience at work
• Build a team culture where high standards and real care for customers go hand in hand
• Recruit thoughtfully as the team grows toward 12, and set new people up to succeed quickly
• Create career paths. The best TSMs should want to stay and grow at Port.

Strategy and Operations
• Build and continuously improve the playbooks your team runs every day: onboarding, adoption, business reviews, renewals, and expansion
• Define the metrics that tell you how healthy the team and the portfolio really are, and use them to make good decisions
• Find the patterns emerging across accounts and build programs that address them before they become problems
• Create consistency without killing autonomy. Your team should feel like they are running a well-designed system, not following a script.

Customer Outcomes and Executive Engagement
• Be the person who gets called when an account is at risk. Your TSMs should know you have their back.
• Engage directly with engineering executives and CTOs at key accounts, particularly around renewals, expansions, and difficult moments
• Hold the team to a high bar on how they communicate value. Technical wins need to connect to business outcomes. Every time.

Cross-functional Collaboration
• Work closely with Account Executives on the commercial side of the portfolio: renewals, expansion, and which accounts need more attention
• Partner with Solutions Architecture on engagements that need deeper technical resources
• Give Product and Engineering a clear picture of what is actually happening in the field. Not just individual feedback, but the real patterns.
• Work with Marketing when the right customer stories emerge

Requirements

What We Are Looking For
• 7+ years in a technical, customer-facing role. CSM, TAM, Solutions Engineer, or something similar at a SaaS company. You know what good looks like in this work because you have done it.
• 3+ years managing technical, customer-facing teams. You have hired people, developed them, had hard conversations, and helped them get better.
• A solid technical foundation in DevOps, platform engineering, and cloud-native environments: CI/CD, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud providers. You do not need to be an engineer, but you need to be credible in conversations with the people your team works with every day.
• Experience building programs that actually work in practice: onboarding frameworks, success playbooks, escalation paths, business review structures. Not just the slide deck version.
• A data-driven approach to running your team. You define the right metrics, you look at them regularly, and you let the data inform what you do next.
• Strong commercial instincts. You understand how retention and expansion work in enterprise SaaS, and you help your team think about the business side without losing the customer relationship.
• Strong communication skills at every level. You can go deep with a platform engineer and then walk into a room full of executives and make it land.
• Curiosity about where developer tooling and AI are heading. You do not need deep expertise on day one, but you should be someone who pays attention and wants to learn.

Nice to Have
• Experience with internal developer portals, platform engineering tools, or developer experience products
• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering workflows or developer productivity tooling
• Experience building a team from scratch, or inheriting one and significantly raising its performance

Why Port
• Competitive salary, equity, and full benefits
• Hybrid schedule: in office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in Austin, TX or Boston, MA
• A product that engineers actually want to use. That makes your team's job meaningfully easier.
• A leadership team that treats customer success as a strategic priority, not an afterthought
• A real opportunity to set the standard for technical customer success at a company growing fast and taking the function seriously

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