Director, Customer Success

About Backstory

Backstory (formerly People.ai) is the leading AI answers platform for sales teams. With more than a decade of training AI models on billions of sales interactions, Backstory enables modern sales teams to ask questions and get the right answer in the moment directly within their existing AI workflows. Sales leaders from companies like OpenAI, IBM, Red Hat, Verizon, Palo Alto Networks, Iron Mountain, TransUnion, Randstad and others rely on Backstory to get trusted answers wrapped in real business context helping them orchestrate deals more effectively and drive revenue.

By connecting every signal to the right accounts and opportunities, Backstory shows teams exactly what is happening and what to do next. Customers across industries including enterprise, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and defense use Backstory to drive trillions in pipeline and revenue.

Recognized by Gartner and Forrester, the Inc. 5000, Y Combinator Top Companies, and the Forbes AI 50, Backstory is based in San Francisco and backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital.

The Role

We're looking for a Director of Customer Success to lead our CS organization and own retention and consumption across our full customer base. You'll lead a team of one to two managers and around eight to twelve CSMs, and you'll build the customer motions that put our deepest investment where growth is most likely while moving every customer toward deployed, production-grade use of Backstory.

This role is for someone who looks past the request to the business problem underneath it. You'll bring that instinct to every customer conversation, teach it to your team, and work closely with Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Studio and Product. You'll also lead by example by running CS on Backstory itself and showing customers what the platform makes possible.

Responsibilities

• Own retention and consumption

  • Drive gross retention, expansion and credit consumption, and lead customers onto the Backstory platform

  • Give leadership a weekly view of renewal risk, and run save motions with direct executive engagement

• Run segmented customer motions

  • Run three coverage models: high-touch strategic, time-boxed emerging, and scaled, moving emerging accounts into strategic coverage within their renewal cycle

  • Own account alignment, book economics, capacity planning, and the playbooks that take accounts from data platform adoption to deployed use cases

• Deliver value through solution-based thinking

  • Understand each strategic customer's business, technical environment, and what our product can become for them

  • Trace every request to an agreed problem statement and measurable outcome, and own the value realization framework (success plans, executive readouts, EBRs)

• Build a high-performing team

  • Hire, develop and retain managers and CSMs, with a bench ready for larger books and new segments

  • Build solution instinct across the team: spot the architecture under a request, gather context before engaging technical teams, and see it through

  • Own onboarding and ramp, career paths and performance standards

• Run the CS operating rhythm

  • Own weekly renewal reviews, segment account reviews, monthly business reviews and quarterly planning

  • Maintain the metrics and dashboards behind them, and manage budget, staffing and process

• Be our best customer

  • Run CS on Backstory, from account plans and health signals to renewal reviews and customer prep

  • Lead forums where CSMs share their platform workflows, and turn daily use into product input

• Lead cross-functional partnerships

  • Own the Sales to CS relationship, from handoff standards to joint renewal and expansion planning

  • Coordinate with Professional Services, Technical Support and Studio on strategic accounts

  • Bring the customer's voice into product and go-to-market planning, and support references, stories and Marketing's advisory programs

Qualifications

• 12+ years in Customer Success, Account Management or post-sales leadership, including 5+ years leading teams and developing managers

• A track record of owning retention and expansion outcomes in B2B SaaS

• Experience building segmentation, capacity models, playbooks and metrics that scale, and running a function from data in Salesforce, Gainsight or similar

• Hands-on experience designing success planning, EBR and value frameworks for enterprise customers, and translating product usage into outcomes executives care about

• The ability to find the problem beneath a feature request, build from existing capabilities, and know when to say no, scope down or escalate with a recommendation

• Strong product intuition: you learn a product quickly, spot patterns across customers, and turn them into credible product demand

• Executive presence with C-level customer stakeholders and senior internal leaders, including negotiating and influencing on high-stakes decisions

• A proven partnership record with Sales, Services, Support and Product

• You use Claude and other leading AI tools in your own work, understand agentic workflows and MCP-based integrations, and have a clear point of view on how AI is changing the CS role

• You learn a system before you change it, take feedback well, and can disagree and commit

Strongly preferred: experience leading customers through usage-based or consumption pricing, and tying variable consumption back to delivered value.