Staff Customer Success Manager

About this role

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…