Senior Director, Customer Success - Program Operations

About the role

mpathic is seeking a Vice President, Customer Success to lead the post-sale experience for our high-touch clients across Life Sciences and AI Labs campaigns. You will lead Program Operations, our team of Technical Program Managers who carry each customer program from contract handoff through delivery, and you will be accountable for customer outcomes, retention, and growth.
This is a role about people and process in equal measure. You will build a positive, trusting team culture where program managers do their best work on sensitive, high-stakes subject matter, and you will design customer-centric processes so that every client, whether a frontier AI lab running a fast-moving evaluation campaign or a life sciences organization with rigorous stakeholder and compliance needs, experiences mpathic as a dependable and caring partner.
What you'll do

Build a positive, high-performing team culture

Lead Program Operations (Technical Program Managers): hire, coach, and develop the team, and grow strong people managers and leads as the function scales.
Create a culture of trust, psychological safety, accountability, and recognition, with care for the people doing demanding work on sensitive topics such as AI safety, mental health, and healthcare.
Set clear expectations, career paths, and workload and capacity norms so the team can sustain high performance without burnout.
Establish remote-first ways of working: strong documentation, clear communication cadences, and regular team rituals that keep a distributed team connected.
Design customer-centric processes for high-touch clients

Define the end-to-end customer journey from contract handoff through onboarding, delivery, review, renewal, and expansion.
Build repeatable playbooks for kickoff, status reporting, executive business reviews, escalation paths, and campaign close-out.
Tailor engagement models to the needs of Life Sciences clients and AI Labs clients while keeping a common operational backbone.
Create customer health measures and feedback loops (for example CSAT, post-campaign retrospectives, and executive check-ins) and act on what they tell us.
Own customer outcomes and executive relationships

Serve as executive sponsor and escalation point for key accounts, building trusted relationships with customer leadership.
Partner with Sales on renewals, expansion, and forecasting, and surface growth opportunities that emerge through delivery.
Bring the voice of the customer to Product, Engineering, and Clinical Solutions so what we hear in the field shapes what we build.
Be the connective tissue

Create a smooth sales-to-delivery handoff so customers feel continuity from the first conversation through go-live.
Keep Sales, Clinical Solutions, Data Services, QA, Engineering, and Product aligned on what is being delivered and why.
Partner with delivery and operations leaders on staffing and capacity planning to support business growth.
Operate with rigor

Own the metrics that matter for the function, such as retention, net revenue retention, on-time delivery, quality, and customer satisfaction.
Build scalable systems and tooling that improve project visibility, quality, and throughput across customer programs.
What you'll accomplish

In your first 60-90 days you'll...
Build a deep understanding of how work flows at mpathic from contract handoff to final delivery across human data, AI safety, red teaming, evaluation, and reporting programs.
Meet every key customer and every member of Program Operations, and learn what is working and what is not from both sides.
Establish trusted working relationships with Sales, Clinical Solutions, Product, Engineering, and delivery leaders.
Identify the biggest gaps in culture, process, and customer experience, and share a clear plan for addressing them.
In your first year you'll...
Have a well-structured, engaged Program Operations team with clear roles, career paths, and strong leaders in place.
Run documented, repeatable customer processes for onboarding, delivery, reviews, and escalations that high-touch clients recognize and value.
Show measurable improvement in customer satisfaction, retention and expansion across Life Sciences and AI Labs accounts.
Partner with Sales and Product on a customer feedback loop that visibly influences the roadmap.
You'll thrive in the role if you:

Have [10+] years of experience in customer success, program or project management, or customer-facing delivery leadership at a SaaS, services, or hybrid software-and-services company, including [3+] years managing managers or multi-function teams.
Have built team cultures that people describe as positive, supportive, and high-trust, and can point to how you did it.
Have designed customer-centric processes and playbooks for high-touch, complex accounts and can balance standardization with the flexibility those clients need.
Have led technical program or project management teams that deliver complex, expert-driven programs.
Are comfortable with high-stakes, sensitive subject matter and bring care for both customers and the teams doing the work.
Communicate crisply and credibly with executives, customers, and distributed teams, and align people around ownership and timelines without relying on authority.
Have experience in AI safety, LLM evaluation, red teaming, or human data operations, or deep experience with AI/ML customers and are excited to apply it to AI safety. This is the area we weight most heavily.
Ideally, have also managed projects or programs in Life Sciences or Healthcare, and understand the regulatory, stakeholder, and quality expectations that come with those clients.
Thrive in an early-stage, remote-first environment where you will build the playbook as you go.
Role details

Location: Remote (US), West Coast preferred
Schedule: Full-time
Focus: Customer success, program operations leadership, team culture, and customer-centric process design
Compensation: annual base salary plus performance-based variable compensation tied to customer retention and other defined customer success objectives. Equity eligibility also be included.

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