Director Customer Success Engineering

About the Role:  

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build and scale our Customer Success Engineering (CSE) team at Redpanda. You'll lead a team of Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects who ensure our customers successfully adopt and scale with Redpanda's streaming data platform.

This is a leadership-first role. You need to be technical enough to hire exceptional talent, coach your team through complex customer engagements, and credibly represent CSE in product and engineering discussions. But your primary impact will come through team development, process excellence, and operational leverage—not being the most technical person in every room.

Our CSE model is built on precision and leverage, not long-term embedded engagements. We deliver customer success through focused, high-impact interactions paired with reusable assets that scale our expertise. Rather than solving the same problem repeatedly for individual customers, we invest in creating content, reference architectures, and self-service resources that enable hundreds of customers to succeed independently. Think: targeted workshops and architecture sessions that accelerate time-to-value, combined with blogs, videos, documentation, and blueprints that customers can apply on their own.

We work closely with pre-sales to understand opportunities early and ensure smooth handoffs from evaluation to production. And while we're primarily focused on technical enablement today, we're building the foundation for potential professional services offerings as we scale—so experience thinking about services evolution and monetization is valuable.

You Will:  

Build and lead the team

• Hire, develop, and retain world-class Solutions Architects and Scale Solutions Architects across different customer segments
• Create career frameworks and growth paths that attract and retain top technical talent
• Coach your team through complex customer engagements, helping them develop judgment on when to go deep vs. when to scale
• Build processes and playbooks that create leverage—turning one-off solutions into repeatable patterns and reusable assets
• Partner with Customer Success Management and Sales to align on account strategy, coverage models, and opportunity pipeline
• Drive operational excellence through metrics, forecasting, and resource allocation across Tier 1/2/3 customers
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, customer-first mindset, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with pre-sales teams to ensure technical win strategies translate into successful customer outcomes

Maintain technical credibility

• Stay current on streaming platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and emerging technologies like agentic AI to evaluate candidates and coach your team effectively
• Participate in strategic customer conversations where executive-level technical leadership matters
• Represent CSE in product roadmap discussions, translating customer needs into actionable feedback
• Review and guide complex solution architectures, proof-of-concept designs, and reference implementations
• Keep pace with Redpanda's product capabilities—including innovations like the Agentic Data Plane—competitive landscape, and streaming ecosystem

Drive scalable customer impact

• Champion the shift from o