Founding Customer Success Manager
Base — $160k – $180k | OTE — ~$230k – $255k | Equity — 0.3% | In-person NYC
About Datalab
Datalab trains models that read documents reliably at scale. The world's most important information is trapped in PDFs, scans, and files that can't easily be parsed, and getting it out correctly matters. From frontier AI labs processing training data to Fortune 500s like Siemens extracting decades of engineering records, Datalab is where businesses turn to when extraction has to be right.
We're at an 8-figure run rate with a team of 7. Anthropic is a customer. And we have hundreds more across FAANG, frontier AI labs, healthcare, finance, government, and legal. Our tools, chandra, surya, marker, and lift, have 70,000+ GitHub stars and broad developer mindshare. We're backed by founding members of OpenAI, FAIR, and Hugging Face.
Role Overview
We're looking for a Founding Customer Success Manager to own the relationship with our enterprise customers after they sign. You'll be accountable for adoption, retention, and growth — making sure customers get real value from our models, stay for the long run, and expand their usage over time. You'll be the face of Datalab for every account you own: their trusted advisor, their first call when something matters, and the person keeping their goals moving forward.
You will be the commercial and relationship manager who owns the account strategy after a deal has been signed. You'll orchestrate the right people internally so the customer always feels progress. You'll know the product and the customer's architecture well enough to lead most conversations yourself, and you'll pull in Engineering when an account needs it.
We also have a long tail of self-serve customers using our API. Many are strong candidates to expand into enterprise contracts, and you'll own that self-serve → enterprise motion end to end — from spotting high-potential accounts to closing the upgraded contract.
This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of customer strategy and technical fluency. You should be comfortable leading executive conversations, working with Engineering teams, be credible talking through an integration, and accountable for commercial outcomes.
Day to day, you will:
Own the post-sales relationship for a portfolio of enterprise accounts — the trusted advisor and first point of escalation, orchestrating internal resources to keep customers delighted and unblocked.
Lead onboarding, drive adoption, and execute technical delivery so customers reach first value fast and keep expanding usage from there.
Run the cadence that builds trust: regular check-ins, business reviews, and proactive, continuous value delivery tied to each customer's goals.
Own renewals and expansion, forecasting your book and turning healthy usage into larger commitments.
Define and drive the self-serve → enterprise expansion strategy, spotting high-potential API accounts and converting them into contracts.
Be the voice of the customer internally, feeding usage patterns and requests back to product and engineering to shape the roadmap.
Build the repeatable playbooks (e.g., onboarding checklists, health scoring, QBR templates, expansion plays) that let account management scale.
How the role works with the team
You're the constant thread through a set of our major enterprise accounts. Our Solutions Engineer handles technical proof — evals, benchmarks, POCs, and getting customers live — and engineering owns the product and roadmap. You own the relationship and the outcome, pulling in the right people at the right moment. A typical thread looks like this:
You’re reviewing account health and scanning for growth signals, and notice a customers API usage has spiked recently. You reach out and learn that they’re experimenting with a POC of a new tool that uses Datalab. You work with. the customer to understand their use case and timelines of this new POC. You loop in the Solutions Engineer, who helps build a benchmark tailored to their new use case. From this experience, you build an expansion playbook to identify and support API customers for this particular use case.
The division: the SE runs the technical proof, engineering owns the product, and you own the relationship, the commercial outcome, and the coordination that ties it together.
On the sales side: Our Account Executive owns new-logo deals and hands off at signature. You own the commercial relationship after signature/conversion: expansion, renewals, and converting self-serve API users into enterprise contracts, including the close. An existing self-serve customer who raises their hand to grow is your warm expansion opportunity.
Ideal Candidate
You have experience owning customer relationships and a technical background that lets you go deep when it counts. You're high ownership, extremely organized, and excited about breaking down messy problems and turning them into consistent, repeatable processes.
Experience in account management, customer success, or a technical customer-facing role, ideally owning renewals and expansion for enterprise accounts.
Strong problem-solving skills and technical acumen — enough to navigate complex technical environments and map our capabilities to what a customer actually needs.
Excellent written and verbal communication. You can translate technical concepts clearly for audiences ranging from engineers to executives.
Comfort owning commercial outcomes: forecasting, negotiating renewals, and driving expansion.
Bonus points if you:
Have experience at an early-stage startup.
Have a technical degree (CS, engineering, math, physics) even if you took a non-technical career path.
Have familiarity with document AI, OCR, APIs, or developer-focused products.
Interview process
A 30-minute video call to evaluate fit
A 1-hour conversation to go deep on your past work
A paid take-home project (~4-5 hours, $300) — design the post-sale motion for a segment of our customers: onboarding, health scoring, and an expansion play for the segment
A 1-hour follow-up to discuss the project and meet the team
At this stage of the company, every interview is somewhat custom, so these phases may be rearranged slightly.