Technical Account Manager / Customer Success Engineer

About OpenObserve

OpenObserve is a fast-growing, developer-forward observability platform built for modern, high-scale systems. We help engineering teams ship faster and sleep better by making logs, metrics, and traces simpler, faster, and far more cost-efficient. Our cloud-native architecture and smart indexing deliver real-time insights without complexity or runaway costs.

Backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital, the open-source project has over 22K GitHub stars and 10K active deployments. Our customers include some of the largest engineering organizations globally, choosing OpenObserve to unify observability, cut costs, and accelerate incident response.

Our culture is product-obsessed, customer-driven, and emphasizes high ownership. We move quickly, value clarity, and encourage bold initiatives.

About the Role

Reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, this role focuses on the customer’s technical journey with OpenObserve, starting before contract signing. You’ll collaborate with sales during proofs of concept (POCs), guide pilots to full deployment, and ensure customers achieve their goals with OpenObserve—keeping them for years.

This is a technical role. Our customers are platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leaders, often migrating from tools like Datadog, Splunk, or Elastic. You’ll need to understand their architecture, engage deeply with the product, and advocate for best practices in observability.

Ideal candidates come from engineering, SRE, or support backgrounds and enjoy working with users of what they build. You’ll maintain technical engagement while receiving commercial coaching.

This is not a support role. Success is proactive: anticipating customer needs, addressing issues before they escalate, and driving outcomes—not just closing tickets. You’ll collaborate closely with support and engineering, owning escalations but focusing on outcomes over ticket resolution.

What Success Looks Like

After twelve months, four key outcomes will define success:

• Customer retention and growth: Customers renew contracts, and most send more data than at the start. Retention and portfolio growth are the primary metrics.

• Pilot to production: Customers transitioning from POCs achieve full-scale deployment on schedule, replacing incumbent tools.

• Proactive problem-solving: You identify issues before customers do—such as usage drops, champion departures, or incomplete onboarding—and take corrective action.

• Process improvement: Onboarding, health scoring, and business reviews are documented and repeatable, ensuring the next hire starts with a head start.

What You’ll Own

• POCs and pilots: Engage in evaluations before contracts are signed. Collaborate with account executives to define success criteria, onboard customer data, and validate the pilot’s outcomes.

• Pilot to full deployment: Lead customers from pilot success to full-scale production. Plan cutovers from legacy tools, configure data sources, pipelines, dashboards, and alerts, and keep projects on schedule.

• Adoption and outcomes: Develop success plans tied to customer goals (e.g., cost savings, incident response time, coverage). Monitor usage and health metrics, and address early warning signs proactively.

• Technical guidance: Review customer architectures, ingestion, retention, and query performance. Provide actionable recommendations—demonstrating changes directly in the product, not just on slides.

• Relationships: Build trust with engineers who use OpenObserve daily and with leadership who signed the contract. Conduct business reviews that stakeholders want to attend.

• Renewals and expansion: Own or partner with sales on renewals. Identify expansion opportunities (e.g., new teams, data sources, or use cases) and collaborate with account executives to close them.

• Escalations: Coordinate with support and engineering when issues arise, keeping customers informed. You own the customer experience even when you don’t own the fix.

• Voice of the customer: Share insights from accounts with product and engineering teams, ensuring they can act on feedback.

• The playbook: Create POC templates, onboarding guides, migration runbooks, and training content to accelerate the next customer’s success.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The best candidates blend engineering, consulting, and diplomacy. They can debug technical issues in the morning and navigate commercial discussions in the afternoon.

• Experience: 4+ years in technical roles like software engineering, SRE, DevOps, support engineering, or solutions engineering. Prior customer success or technical account management experience is a plus.

• Observability expertise: Hands-on experience with tools like Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, or New Relic. Strong opinions on what constitutes effective observability.

• Technical credibility: Comfortable with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, OpenTelemetry, and log/metric/trace pipelines. Capable of writing SQL, reading config files, and troubleshooting issues independently.

• Support vs. success mindset: Success is measured by customer progress toward goals, not ticket closure. You proactively address challenges before they escalate.

• Emotional intelligence: Skilled at reading between the lines—identifying frustration in emails and tailoring communication to engineers (who need answers) or executives (who need reassurance). Delivers bad news constructively.

• Curiosity and adaptability: Driven to understand why things work, not just that they do. Quick learner of new technologies and customer stacks.

• Communication: Clarity in writing and speaking, bridging gaps between hands-on engineers and executives.

• Commercial acumen: Understands how businesses operate, distinguishing expansion opportunities from favors. Open to learning commercial strategies.

• Organization: Manages multiple accounts and projects simultaneously without losing track of details.

• Early-stage mindset: Thrives in ambiguity and prefers building processes over inheriting them.

What We Offer

• Impact: Early involvement in customer success with direct access to the CRO. Influence over how OpenObserve wins, onboards, retains, and grows customers.

• Career path: Transition from engineering to customer success with coaching from the CRO. Stay close to technology while developing commercial skills.

• Compensation: Competitive base salary, bonus tied to retention and growth, and meaningful equity.

• Product pride: Represent an open-source-rooted product with clear technical differentiation and passionate customers.

• Benefits: Full benefits, flexible schedule, and unlimited PTO.

• Growth: Path to senior, principal, or leadership roles as the team scales.

Location

Remote (United States). Core collaboration hours required with occasional travel for customer visits, events, and team offsites.