Technical Customer Success Manager

Remote from: USA
Salary, yearly, USD: 123,250 - 166,750
Department: Customer Success
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 12 Jul 2026
Apply before: 12 Aug 2026
Experience level: Midweight
Views / Applies: 28 / 2

About company

About Defense Unicorns

Transforming defense through innovative technology solutions.

Computer Software
2021

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Technical Customer Success Manager to serve as a strategic partner for customers in high-stakes environments. The role involves deep technical advisory on Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GitOps, while owning account relationships and driving adoption. Responsibilities include leading executive reviews, troubleshooting deployments, and identifying expansion opportunities. The ideal candidate has excellent communication skills, experience with platform engineering, and familiarity with compliance frameworks. This position requires 10%-25% travel and offers a competitive salary range.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight This role requires deep technical expertise in Kubernetes and CI/CD, strategic account management, and the ability to handle high-stakes environments, making it very challenging.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range of $123,250-$166,750 is competitive for a technical customer success role, with a median of $145,000. This aligns with market rates for positions requiring advanced technical skills and strategic customer management.

Core Skills Required

Kubernetes CI/CD Customer Success Account Management Technical Advisory GitOps Security/Compliance Platform Engineering DevOps Strategic Planning

Cover Letter Sample

Dear Hiring Team,

I am writing to express my strong interest in the Technical Customer Success Manager position at Defense Unicorns. With a background in platform engineering and a passion for helping customers achieve mission-critical outcomes, I am confident in my ability to thrive in this high-stakes environment.

My experience with Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps workflows, combined with my strategic account management skills, aligns perfectly with the requirements of this role. I have a proven track record of building trusted relationships with both technical teams and executive leadership, driving platform adoption, and identifying growth opportunities.

I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to your mission and help your customers succeed. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, [Your Name]

Sample Interview Questions

Describe a time when you had to handle a complex technical deployment challenge with a customer. How did you approach it?

I worked with a customer moving their applications to Kubernetes. They faced issues with network policies. I collaborated with our engineering team to design a solution, created documentation, and led enablement sessions, resulting in successful deployment and improved customer satisfaction.

How do you measure customer success and adoption for a platform?

I track metrics like time-to-value, feature adoption rates, and customer health scores. I also conduct regular reviews to ensure alignment with their goals and proactively address any gaps.

How would you manage a customer who is not seeing the expected value from the platform?

I would first conduct a deep dive to understand their objectives and pain points. Then, I would create a tailored success plan, involving our engineering team if needed, to demonstrate quick wins and align the platform capabilities to their specific use cases.

Explain your experience with compliance and security in regulated environments.

In my previous role, I worked with customers in healthcare and finance, ensuring their deployments met HIPAA and SOC2 requirements. I guided them on secure configurations and audit readiness, which is critical for Defense Unicorns' customer base.

How do you prioritize multiple customers and competing demands?

I use a risk-based prioritization framework, focusing on customers with the highest churn risk or biggest opportunities. I also set clear expectations with customers and leverage our CRM to track engagement and automate routine tasks.

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 10%-25%

Role Description:

At Defense Unicorns, we don’t do average. We build software for high-stakes environments, and our customers need more than a check-in-once-a-quarter CSM — they need a technical partner who can go deep, move fast, and keep calm when things get hard. You’ll be embedded with customers, helping them get real value from our platform, partnering with our engineers when things get exciting, and making sure every account you own is set up to grow. Technical enough to hold your own in the weeds, strategic enough to run an executive review. If that sounds like your kind of work, you’ll fit right in with our team of Unicorns.

Responsibilities:

As the main point of contact for key accounts, you will build strong relationships with leadership and technical teams to ensure they are getting the most from the platform. You will act as a strategic advisor together with our engineers, helping customers navigate their platform and requirements while solving any roadblocks they encounter. By deeply understanding their goals, you will ensure long-term success, driving high adoption rates and identifying opportunities to grow the partnership.

Mission & Account Ownership:

Serve as the primary post-sales success lead for assigned commercial accounts
Build trusted relationships with executive leadership, engineering teams, and technical stakeholders
Develop and execute outcome-aligned success plans for our customers
Lead Quarterly/Executive Reviews focused on platform value, operational readiness, and customer outcomes
Proactively identify adoption gaps, risks, and expansion opportunities

Technical Advisory & Enablement:

Assist customers on Kubernetes-based platform architecture questions
Guide customers through secure software delivery principles and complex deployment requirements
Advise on CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and modern software delivery practices
Troubleshoot complex deployment challenges in partnership with Engineering
Articulate customer requirements related to compliance, security, and regulatory frameworks

Growth & Expansion:

Identify renewal & expansion opportunities across our customer base
Drive deeper platform adoption across development teams

Success Metrics:

Platform adoption across customer accounts
Renewal and expansion within assigned accounts
Time-to-operational capability
Customer health and satisfaction
Successful platform deployments and time-to-value

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned or discovered based on the evolving needs of the organization. The successful candidate is a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. You will be expected not just to fill gaps as they arise, but proactively identify and take ownership of gaps to drive toward new processes and solutions.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

Excellent verbal and written communication skills; the ability to effectively interact with Heroes, stakeholders, and team members at all levels of the organization and across all Departments
Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively adapt communication behaviors and tactics to improve working relationships and optimize customer outcomes
Exceptional problem-solving and decision-making abilities, with a strategic mindset
Experience transitioning customer value delivery from services to productized approaches
Experience and comfort facilitating cross-department problem solving exercises that drive business insights and turn inputs into decisions
Experience supporting business initiatives across functional areas to inform business strategy and evolution
Experience with day to day systems like: Hubspot, Github, Unthread (support ticketing) & Notion
Familiarity with regulated, high-compliance, or constrained deployment environments (a plus)
Experience working with platform engineering teams
Background in cloud-native technologies (AWS, Azure, on-prem Kubernetes)
Familiarity with open-source ecosystems

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Remote – USA

$123,250—$166,750 USD

Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

Kubernetes
Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
GitOps
Containers
CNCF projects and open source products and packages
Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
Building and improving security delivery
Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

Medical/Dental/Vision
Premiums are 100% Company Paid
Health Savings Account
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance

Financial:

401k Retirement Plan
Company Stock Options
Home Office Budget

Leave:

We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t meet every requirement listed.

At Defense Unicorns, we’re committed to diversity. If you’re enthusiastic about the role but don’t match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

CCPA DISCLOSURE

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