Director Customer Success Engineering Austin, TX; Hybrid

Overview

Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) — a category in AI infrastructure that connects AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, Redpanda enables agentic applications to reason and act in real-time with speed, autonomy, and precision. Global leaders rely on Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data daily. Redpanda is backed by premier venture investors and is a diverse, people-first organization with teams distributed around the globe.

About the Role:

We are looking for an experienced engineering leader to build and scale our Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team  will lead a team of Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects who ensure our customers successfully adopt and scale with Redpanda s streaming data platform. This is a leadership-first role focused on team development, process excellence, and operational leverage.

Our CSE model emphasizes precision and leverage through focused, high-impact interactions and reusable assets that scale expertise. We create content, reference architectures, and self-service resources to enable hundreds of customers to succeed independently.

We collaborate with pre-sales to understand opportunities early and are exploring potential services offerings as we scale.

Build and lead the team

• Hire, develop, and retain world-class Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects across different customer segments
• Create career frameworks and growth paths that attract and retain top technical talent
• Coach your team through complex customer engagements, helping them develop judgment on when to go deep vs. when to scale
• Build processes and playbooks that create leverage—turning one-off solutions into repeatable patterns and reusable assets
• Partner with Customer Success Management and Sales to align on account strategy, coverage models, and opportunity pipeline
• Drive operational excellence through metrics, forecasting, and resource allocation across Tier 1/2/3 customers
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, customer-first mindset, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with pre-sales teams to ensure technical win strategies translate into successful customer outcomes

Maintain technical credibility

• Stay current on streaming platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and emerging technologies like agentic AI to evaluate candidates and coach your team effectively
• Participate in strategic customer conversations where executive-level technical leadership matters
• Represent CSE in product roadmap discussions, translating customer needs into actionable feedback
• Review and guide complex solution architectures, proof-of-concept designs, and reference implementations
• Keep pace with Redpanda s product capabilities—including innovations like the Agentic Data Plane—competitive landscape, and streaming ecosystem

Drive scalable customer impact

• Champion the shift from one-off problem solving to creating reusable content and self-service resources
• Build programs that multiply team impact: office hours, webinars, technical content series, solution blueprints
• Ensure the team balances short-term precision engagements with building long-term leverage through documentation and enablement
• Think strategically about how CSE capabilities could evolve into professional services offerings as the business scales

You Have

• 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Architecture, Forward Deployed Engineering, Professional Services, or Customer Success Engineering
• 3+ years leading and developing technical teams, ideally in high-growth B2B SaaS or infrastructure software
• Track record of scaling teams and processes as organizations grow—experience leading traditional SA teams or forward deployed engineering organizations particularly relevant
• Experience building coverage models that balance high-touch relationships with scaled programs
• Comfort operating in a player-coach capacity when needed, but primarily focused on multiplying impact through your team
• Understanding of the demands of working in a startup environment
• Customer-first mindset with ability to balance customer advocacy with business…