Customer Success Engineer

About AuthZed

We're 100% focused on authorization. Our founders (ex-Google, CoreOS, Red Hat) became deeply curious about the complexities of authorization while building the first private Docker registry, Quay. Having experienced the growing pains of efficiently scaling permissions and inspired by Google’s Zanzibar system, we built SpiceDB - the most mature, open-source permissions database. Today, we’re pioneering open-source authorization solutions for businesses by tackling complex end-user permissions in zero-trust architectures at any scale.

The Role

We are hiring an experienced and technical Customer Success Engineer who will partner with our Account Executives to serve our most valued customers in the post-sales cycle. In this role, you will be responsible for nurturing relationships with strategic accounts; guiding the implementation process and adoption of best practices, reducing technical friction and facilitating a seamless experience across the customer lifecycle. You’re the primary technical liaison between our customers and critical internal stakeholders, including engineering, product, and support. This role requires a strong technical background, effective communication, empathy, and a deep commitment to customer success.

What You'll Do

• Support your accounts as the post-sale point of contact for technical inquiries, working alongside an Account Executive.

• Lead our service delivery process to ensure timely delivery of orders and successful production deployments.

• Educate customers on basic and advanced AuthZed product concepts.

• Guide your customers towards best-practice implementations; including reviewing code and designingSpiceDB Schemas.

• Partner with Account Executives and Solutions Engineers to identify and secure new sales opportunities.

• Collect and deliver customer feedback to our engineering and product teams.

• Continuously monitor, update, and report on customer health – ensuring customers are meeting their desired performance SLOs and flagging potential churn risks to the leadership team.

• Proactively build relationships with customers to achieve loyalty and advocacy within their organization.

Essential Qualifications

• Experience: Minimum 3+ years as a customer success engineer or similar customer-facing role supporting enterprise customers in the software industry, preferably database or similar infrastructure software.

• Industry Experience. Experience working with engineering organizations within Fortune 1000 companies.

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a relevant field. Directly related work experience will also be considered in lieu of formal education.

• Technical Proficiency:

  • Hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., Postgres), including defining schemas, performing migrations, and writing SQL queries.

  • Proficient in designing and deploying solutions in cloud environments (AWS, GCP) and managing Kubernetes clusters.

  • Skilled in at least one of the following programming languages: Go, Javascript, Java, or Python.

  • Experience integrating against HTTP or gRPC APIs, including handling streams and pagination.

• Communication and Analytical Skills: Proven ability to triage, diagnose, and solve complex technical issues, and recommend solutions based on customer requirements.

• Technical Demos and Presentations: Proven track record of conducting training sessions, demos, and presentations to stakeholders of various technical levels.

• Flexibility and Adaptability: Comfortable with ambiguous and changing requirements, with a rapid ability to learn new technical concepts.

Additional Responsibilities

• Project Management and Organization: Proven track record for keeping multiple stakeholders aligned and focused on achieving target outcomes across multiple disparate work streams.

• Client Relationships: Proven experience in building and maintaining strong relationships with key stakeholders in customer accounts.

• CRM and Task Management: Experience with CRM systems and task management software to track and manage customer engagements effectively.

• Travel: Open to travel for customer onsite visits as required. (less than 10% of your time)

Nice to Have's

• Open Source Involvement: Experience working with and contributing to open-source software projects.

• Advanced Architecture and Software Knowledge:

  • Experience integrating against gRPC APIs

  • Experience with graph databases

  • Experience with test-driven development and familiarity with common software design patterns such as Pub/Sub and Proxies.

  • Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including committing data to multiple databases using patterns like change data capture (CDC), message queues, two-phase commit protocol (2PC), and workflow engines like Temporal.

  • Knowledge of distributed quorum-based software (e.g., Paxos, Raft) and distributed relational datastores like CockroachDB.

  • Exposure to policy languages, such as Rego, is a plus.