Manager, Customer Success Engineering

ware developers, rely on Sonatype to optimize their software supply chains.

As the Manager, Customer Success Management (Player-Coach), you will lead from the front by owning direct customer engagement while building the foundation for a growing Customer Success team. Over time, you will expand your leadership scope as the team grows, while maintaining enough proximity to customer reality to coach effectively and scale the right behaviors.

This role is designed for a leader who blends technical credibility, customer leadership, and commercial orientation. You will ensure customers realize value quickly, drive adoption and outcomes, strengthen retention, and consistently identify expansion opportunities for referral to the broader account team. The expectation is proactive customer leadership with a disciplined, outcomes-driven approach.

A defining requirement of this role is reflexive GenAI usage. You are expected to model and institutionalize the use of GenAI tools as a thought partner to improve the quality and strategic rigor of analysis, planning, and communication to accelerate the pace at which the team learns, executes, and scales.

Key Responsibilities

Player-Coach Customer Engagement

• Own direct customer engagement across a portfolio, driving onboarding success, adoption acceleration, and measurable value realization.

• Coach and educate customers on Sonatype solutions and best practices, helping customers progress from implementation to sustained outcomes.

• Use available signals and context to prioritize the right customer engagement at the right time, with a focus on high-leverage actions that move outcomes forward.

Customer Outcomes and Growth Support

• Operate with a customer outcome and value realization mindset: protect renewals by building renewal confidence through value evidence, and consistently identify expansion opportunities and Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs) for referral to the appropriate account team.

• Identify customer needs and expansion pathways and share relevant insights with account team partners to support their engagement.

• Maintain disciplined account hygiene: document customer intent, whitespace, value drivers, and agreed next actions.

Building and Leading the CSM Team

• Lead the operating foundation for a new Customer Success team, including expectations, onboarding, quality standards, and team rhythms.

• Hire, onboard, coach, and develop additional Customer Success Managers as the team scales, ensuring consistency in customer leadership and execution.

• Create a culture of accountability, pace, and continuous improvement, with clear standards for what "good" looks like in customer engagement and collaboration with account teams.

Operating Rhythm and Scalable Execution

• Build and execute repeatable plays and a consistent operating cadence for customer onboarding, adoption, success planning, renewal readiness, and growth pathway development.

• Use data and insights to prioritize effort, identify risk early, and guide decisions on where to focus time and resources.

• Synthesize customer insights and share them with internal partners to improve product experience, enablement, and customer outcomes.

Reflexive GenAI Usage as a Standard

• Use GenAI reflexively as a thought partner to improve the quality, clarity, and strategic rigor of analysis, planning, and communication, while applying sound judgment and validating outputs.

• Establish team norms that make AI-enabled workflows the default to accelerate ramp time, increase consistency, and reduce time-to-insight across customer engagements.

• Identify high-leverage opportunities to use GenAI to scale customer success (e.g., improved customer communication quality, faster preparation, stronger plans, and more consistent follow-through).

What Success Looks Like

• Customers reach value faster and demonstrate stronger adoption outcomes and renewal readiness.

• Customer engagement is proactive and outcomes-driven-not reactive and dominated by ad hoc troubleshooting.

• Expansion signals and CSQLs are consistently identified and shared with the account team.

• The team ramps quickly with clear standards, strong coaching, and repeatable plays.

• GenAI-enabled workflows become a durable advantage, improving quality and scale.

Qualifications

• Experience in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Solutions Consulting, or similar roles in B2B SaaS.

• Prior people leadership experience, or strong player-coach experience leading initiatives and mentoring others, with readiness to build and manage a team.

• Technical aptitude and credibility within modern software development lifecycles (DevOps, CI/CD, artifact management, OSS governance/security).

• Strong customer-facing communication skills and the ability to lead structured conversations that drive outcomes.

• Demonstrated customer outcome orientation: retention focus, expansion signal identification, and disciplined follow-through in partnership with account teams.

• Data-driven mindset and comfort using signals and insights to prioritize action.

• Strong bias for action, ownership, and comfort operating in ambiguity while building something new.

• Strong GenAI fluency and a demonstrated habit of using AI tools to improve execution quality and speed.

Travel / Working Model

India-based, with frequent collaboration across global teams and occasional travel as needed.

At Sonatype, we value diversity and inclusivity. We offer perks such as parental leave, diversity and inclusion working groups, and flexible working practices to allow our employees to show up as their whole selves. We are an equal-opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.