Customer Success Lead

About Dust Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it. With enterprise-grade governance, flexible model choice, and a collaborative interface for humans and agents to work together, Dust empowers AI Operators at the world’s fastest-moving companies to rewire how work gets done. With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast. We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, Vanta and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026. Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50. Summary As Dust’s first dedicated US Customer Success leader, you will build the post-sales motion for one of our most important growth markets. You will begin as a player-coach: personally owning a focused portfolio of strategic customers, leading the coordination of CSMs, Deployment Strategists, and Solutions Engineers, and partnering closely with Sales and Product to drive adoption, retention, and expansion. You will start close to the customer and close to the work, building conviction about what great post-sales looks like at Dust. You will then turn those learnings into the operating rhythms, segmentation, playbooks, and team needed to scale. This is an opportunity to define how Customer Success works at a fast-growing, AI-native company, not simply inherit an existing process. What you'll do Own the US customer-success motion Define and lead the Customer Success approach for Dust’s US customers. Establish how we segment customers and determine the right level of engagement for each account. Coordinate CSMs, Deployment Strategists, Solutions Engineers, and other post-sales partners around shared customer outcomes. Create the operating rhythms that keep the team aligned on adoption, customer health, renewals, escalations, and expansion. Make clear prioritization and resourcing decisions as customer needs evolve. Personally own strategic customers Manage a focused portfolio of strategic and high-complexity accounts. Build trusted relationships with users, champions, technical stakeholders, and executive sponsors. Lead customers from deployment through adoption, value realization, renewal, and expansion. Develop clear success plans tied to the customer’s business priorities and measurable outcomes. Serve as the senior escalation point for high-stakes customer situations. Bring firsthand customer context into decisions about product, process, and team priorities. Build the US post-sales playbook Define what great post-sales delivery looks like across the customer lifecycle. Improve the transition from Sales to Customer Success, including handoff quality, stakeholder mapping, use-case definition, and success criteria. Identify patterns across accounts and turn what works into repeatable playbooks. Create practical approaches to customer health, risk management, executive engagement, adoption, and expansion. Use Dust and other AI tools to increase the leverage of the Customer Success team. Develop the team Coach CSMs and Deployment Strategists to raise the quality of customer work across the board Help define the roles, capabilities, and hiring plan required for the next stage of the US post-sales organization. Evolve from execution-heavy to strategy-heavy as the team grows building an organization that can operate independently Create an environment where people develop faster than they would anywhere else Partner cross-functionally with Sales and Product Work closely with AEs to align pre- and post-sales motions and unlock expansion opportunities Represent the voice of the US customer internally with clarity and conviction Surface recurring customer needs and product gaps, and help Product prioritize them. Contribute to how Dust thinks about customer value, retention, and growth at a company level. Requirements Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same 3 dimensions. Aptitude, Attitude and Agency. Aptitude Has been an excellent Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, or Post-Sales Leader , with strong judgment across account strategy, executive communication, discovery, value articulation, adoption planning, stakeholder management, renewal strategy, and expansion. Has owned strategic B2B SaaS customers through deployment, adoption, value realization, renewal, and expansion. Has led or deeply coordinated multiple post-sales functions , such as Customer Success, deployment, professional services, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed engineering. Brings structured judgment to customer segmentation, account prioritization, and resource allocation, balancing customer urgency, strategic value, commercial importance, and team capacity. Has built or meaningfully contributed to a Customer Success playbook, operating model, or team in a high-growth environment. Is comfortable with technical products and complex customer environments, and can translate between business priorities, product capabilities, and operational execution. Uses AI tools actively in their own work and can identify practical ways to create leverage across the Customer Success motion. Attitude Treats customer outcomes as the north star, not activity metrics, and builds trust through preparation, clarity, follow-through, and honest communication. Surfaces risks and difficult information early, and collaborates naturally with Sales, Product, Engineering, and other teams around shared customer outcomes. Is comfortable operating in a fluid, cross-functional environment where titles do not determine contribution. Develops the people around them through coaching, direct feedback, and example, while maintaining high standards in a rapidly evolving company. Agency Is willing to stay close to the work, personally own strategic accounts, and engage directly in complex customer situations. Can define and build the US post-sales model without waiting for a complete blueprint, turning customer patterns into repeatable processes and playbooks. Makes prioritization and resourcing decisions autonomously, balancing customer urgency, strategic value, commercial importance, and team capacity. Finds ways to create customer outcomes with limited resources and imperfect information, and treats the player-coach phase as an opportunity to build conviction and organizational leverage. Compensation and Benefits Competitive compensation: $260,000–$340,000 OTE Significant equity package in a Sequoia-backed startup Health insurance for you and your dependents New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc. Beautiful office in the heart of SoHo (NYC) Opportunity to travel to Paris multiple times a year Regular team events and offsites Location We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris, London, San Francisco, and New York because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together. We have an office-first culture. Some of the best things about building at Dust are the energy, the fast decisions, and the unexpected conversations that unlock a hard problem, which happen because we are in the same room. Being together is not a formality, it is how we do our best work, and it is something we actively protect. That said, we hire people with strong judgement and we extend that trust to how they manage their time. When working from home makes more sense for what you need to get done that day, we trust you to make that call. Why Dust The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves. We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast. If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk. Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist. Learn how we think and work. Our product constitution, a story about our mission Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024 LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024 #J-18808-Ljbffr XYZ Venture Capital