Customer Success Manager

Customer Success Manager

At Avante, we're changing the way benefits are managed. We're an AI-native benefits intelligence platform built to turn benefits complexity into clarity. For employees, our agent Carly provides personalized, always-on benefits guidance. For benefits leaders, our agent Ava monitors their entire program, surfaces what needs attention, and delivers strategic intelligence on costs, utilization, and outcomes in seconds. Together, these agents create a closed-loop system where employee engagement data informs benefits strategy, and smarter strategy improves the employee experience.

We are headquartered in Seattle and expanding our presence to New York City, with an in-office culture (4 days a week) to drive community, collaboration, and ideation. We are growing fast and are scaling our customer success team to meet the needs of our growing customer base, with notable brands such as Samsung, News Corp, and Zscaler.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Customer Success Manager to own a portfolio of customers post-launch. In this role, you're the strategic partner for our customers to ensure they see ongoing, measurable impact from the Avante platform. Bringing forth a combination of customer service and account management skills, you will build lasting relationships and drive value across a set of both direct enterprise customers and partner-channel clients (brokers and their employer clients).

If you thrive in fast-paced start-up environments and you believe the best customer experiences come from a combination of AI tool adoption, relationship building, product fluency, and genuine care, then this role is for you.

What You'll Do

• Own a portfolio of accounts from go-live forward. Complete warm handoff from implementation and drive ongoing value across every stage of the customer lifecycle. You're the day-to-day strategic contact, the QBR owner, and the person accountable for whether the customer renews and grows.

• Drive measurable value through Ava and Carly. Work with benefits leaders to define what success looks like in their program: cost containment, vendor performance, employee adoption. Use Ava's intelligence to show progress against those goals. Drive employee engagement with Carly through targeted launch communications, nudge strategies, and lifecycle touchpoints.

• Own renewals and support expansion. You're commercially accountable for your book. That means forecasting renewals accurately, building expansion cases backed by real usage and outcomes data, and partnering with sales when there's a multi-product or multi-entity opportunity.

• Run sharp executive conversations. Benefits leaders at our customers are senior people running second-largest-line-item programs. Show up to QBRs and strategic reviews prepared with the right data, a clear point of view, and a set of next steps the room can commit to.

• Translate customer signal into product impact. Customers routinely provide feedback through multiple channels. Bring that signal back to product, engineering, and marketing with enough specificity that the team can act on it. Close the loop with the customer when their feedback shapes a change.

• Use AI tools as a core part of how you work. We expect our CSMs to use Claude (and tools like it) daily: to prep for customer calls, draft executive briefings, analyze utilization data, and build internal artifacts faster. If you've been waiting for permission to bring AI into your CS workflow, this is the team.

• Partner across functions. Coordinate warm handoffs with implementation at go-live, build expansion plays with sales, work with product on what customers actually need, and drive customer advocacy with marketing. CS only works when it's tightly connected to the rest of the org, and at our stage that connection is built one conversation at a time.

• Adapt as we grow. Your book, your tooling, and the role itself will evolve as the company scales. You should expect that and welcome it.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of customer success experience in B2B SaaS, ideally in a product that serves both business buyers and end users (HR tech, employee experience, productivity platforms), with at least 2 years at startups (seed through Series C)

• A track record of commercial ownership: renewals, expansion, or net retention as part of your accountability, not adjacent to it

• Strong executive presence and comfort running QBRs and strategic reviews with senior buyers

• A consultative, outcomes-oriented operating style: you anchor on what changed for the customer, not how many touchpoints you logged

• Genuine excitement about using AI to do your job better, with hands-on examples of how you've already brought it into your workflow

• A self-starter mentality: you're energized by ambiguity and excited to build processes where none exist yet.

• Empathy, calm under pressure, and a genuine commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Nice to Have

• HR tech experience or comparable exposure to the buyer (benefits, HR, total rewards) and the workforce as end users

• Familiarity with healthcare claims data, coding standards (ICD, CPT, HCPCS), or benefits data structures.

• Experience working with channel partners, brokers, or TPAs.

Our Company Values

Our four values aren't aspirational. They translate into concrete operating tenets that shape how we make decisions every day.

Beat Yesterday . We re-evaluate our own toolkit every quarter, because the workflows that made you effective three months ago may already be outdated. We act on 70% of the information rather than waiting for certainty. We timebox, execute, and iterate, getting work in front of real people quickly instead of polishing in isolation. And we own our output regardless of how we produced it. AI can get you 80% of the way there. Everything that goes out with your name on it is your responsibility to review, refine, and stand behind.

Embrace Type 2 Fun . We take on hard problems and find meaning in the work, even when it's uncomfortable. We assume good intent and follow up directly rather than venting in side channels. We celebrate wins loudly and specifically, naming the actual behavior so the whole team learns what great looks like. We are on by default, because we owe it to each other and to our customers to be available beyond what a regular corporate job would demand. And we do unscalable things today that build scalable advantages tomorrow. Every white-glove dinner, every hand-built territory map, every late-night booth setup earns us the right to scale later.

Stay Hungry, Stay Curious . We expect everyone to be the expert on AI in their function before anyone asks them to be. The landscape changes weekly. When you learn something, teach it. Learn enough about adjacent functions to ask good questions, including what your AEs are saying on calls, how brokers actually make money, and why a benefits committee pushes back on a deal. Ask the question you think is too basic, because in complex domains like benefits, the cost of a wrong assumption can be a lost account. And remember: curiosity without urgency is a hobby. Learning has to translate into action on a timeline that matches the opportunity.

Act Like an Owner . We say the uncomfortable thing early, raising missed commitments or quality gaps directly with the person within 48 hours. We surface problems when they're small, not the week they become a crisis. Customer-facing work gets priority, always. And we close the loop every time, because over-communication is a feature at our stage, not a bug.

Role Progression

First 30 Days: Complete comprehensive and supportive onboarding process to help you understand the platform, the business, and the customer journey. Shadow existing customers to understand the current process, pain points, and success stories.

60–90 Days: Begin to take on your first set of customers. Manage hand-offs from implementation and host your first set of QBRs. Build working relationships with sales, marketing, product, and partner teams.

4+ Months: Grow your portfolio of customers and independently manage their success. Have a documented, repeatable customer success process in place. Identify expansion opportunities and pave the path for renewals. Be a key voice in product feedback loops.

Interview Process

We respect your time and aim to keep things efficient:

• Introductory call with our Talent team (