Senior Customer Success Manager – Federal

Remote from: USA
Salary, yearly, USD: 160,000 - 160,000
Department: Customer Success
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 12 Jul 2026
Apply before: 12 Aug 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 55 / 5

About company

About Chainguard

Securing the software supply chain with hardened container images and comprehensive supply chain security solutions.

Computer & Network Security
2021

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Chainguard is seeking a Senior Customer Success Manager to serve as the primary post-sales contact for Federal customers. The role involves driving customer onboarding, adoption, and value realization while collaborating with Solutions Architects, Engineering, and Sales. Ideal candidates have 5+ years in public sector-facing roles and domain knowledge in supply chain security, DevSecOps, or AppSec. This strategic position requires autonomy, entrepreneurial mindset, and strong cross-functional collaboration. The role offers a competitive salary of $160,000 per year.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight The role requires a combination of deep technical domain knowledge, strategic customer management, and public sector experience, making it challenging.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary of $160,000 is at the high end of the market range for Senior Customer Success Managers with federal specialization, indicating strong compensation competitiveness.

Core Skills Required

Customer Success Federal Government Open Source Security DevSecOps Account Management Cross-functional Collaboration SaaS Cybersecurity Strategic Planning

Cover Letter Sample

I am writing to express my strong interest in the Senior Customer Success Manager - Federal position at Chainguard. With over 5 years of experience in public sector customer success and deep knowledge of DevSecOps and open source security, I am confident in my ability to drive adoption and value for your federal clients.

In my previous role, I successfully managed complex onboarding and expansion initiatives for government agencies, ensuring measurable outcomes and high satisfaction. I excel at building relationships across technical and executive stakeholders, aligning product capabilities with mission-critical requirements.

I am particularly drawn to Chainguard's mission of securing the open source supply chain and am eager to contribute to your growth in the federal market. My proactive, entrepreneurial approach aligns well with your need for autonomy and process innovation.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background in federal customer success can help Chainguard achieve its goals. Thank you for your consideration.

Sample Interview Questions

Describe your experience managing customer success for federal clients. What unique challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

I managed a portfolio of government agencies, dealing with complex compliance requirements and longer sales cycles. I overcame challenges by creating detailed onboarding playbooks and leveraging inter-agency relationships to ensure smooth adoption.

How do you approach building relationships with multiple stakeholders, from technical users to CISOs?

I tailor communication to each audience: technical stakeholders get deep product insights, while executives receive ROI-focused updates. I schedule regular business reviews and align success metrics with their strategic goals.

Can you provide an example of a time you identified a risk of churn and successfully retained a customer?

A customer was unhappy with our support response times. I collaborated with engineering to create a dedicated support channel and provided training to their team, resulting in increased satisfaction and a contract renewal.

How do you stay updated on industry trends in supply chain security and DevSecOps?

I regularly attend industry conferences, follow thought leaders, and participate in webinars. I also contribute to internal knowledge sharing to ensure my team stays current.

Describe a time you had to take full ownership of a customer's success without direct guidance. What was the outcome?

When launching a new product feature, I proactively developed a training plan for customers, leading to accelerated adoption and positive feedback. This demonstrated my ability to act autonomously and drive results.

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.
Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.
Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

The role, in a nutshell:

As a Customer Success Manager at Chainguard, you will be the post-sales primary point of contact for our Federal customers. You will be responsible for taking lead on customer engagements across onboarding, implementation, and adoption. In this role, you will work closely with Solutions Architects, Technical Support, Product Management, Engineering and Sales to ensure the successful onboarding and support of your customers. You are their day-to-day contact, building relationships with customers and driving outcomes, adoption, and delivering time-to-value.

What you’ll do:

Success Planning & Value: Drive business success planning by partnering with customers, pre-sales, and post-sales teams to align on requirements, goals, and challenges. Provide thought leadership on change management for large, scaled rollouts. Support the full Business Value Realization cycle to ensure customers can demonstrate and prove value internally.
Customer Advocacy: Act as the voice of the customer within the organization, advocating for customer needs and requirements to internal teams. This means being a team player and having strong collaboration skills – this role must align with many different internal teams, influence them to act toward customer needs.
Issue Management: Collaborate with Technical Support and Customer Engineering teams to ensure timely resolution to customer issues.
Product Expertise: Develop hands-on technical knowledge of Chainguard and stay up-to-date with industry trends, new features, and best practices so you can help customers optimize their use of Chainguard.
Training & Education: Collaborate with customers and our Edu team to ensure customers are educated on product features, best practices, and security principles.
Account Management: Develop relationships with multiple levels of customer stakeholders from technicians to CISOs. Work closely with sales teams to identify the best path to renew and expand customers while minimizing churn risks.

What we’re looking for:

5+ years experience in Public Sector facing roles collaborating with both technical and business teams – Customer Success, Professional Services, Technical Account Management or a combination of those plus Sales, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Support.
Relevant domain knowledge of one or more of the following; Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security infrastructure, containers, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle.
This is a strategic and proactive role, our expectation is that this person will take full ownership of their customer portfolio and act with a high level of autonomy. This includes making key decisions to drive effective customer outcomes; deciding when to include our executive team or c-suite in customer escalations, how to de-risk or de-escalate customer issues and conflict, and advocating to internal teams including sales, product, engineering, etc.
An entrepreneurial mindset – this is a new team at Chainguard where you will be required to both deviate from established procedure and often build entirely new process or practices to ensure we best serve customers.
Demonstrates a strong commitment to continuous personal and professional development, actively seeking opportunities to enhance skills, expand knowledge, and advance within their career and field.
Driven, high emotional intelligence, and strong priority management skills

Strongly Preferred:

Previous early-stage startup experience
Passion for technology & cybersecurity
Relevant hands-on technical experience, in one or more of the following domains: cloud computing environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), containers, Linux, Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security, security infrastructure, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle

Compensation: up to $160,000 base salary + bonus (depending on experience)

About Us

We live and breathe our company values:

We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
We trust each other and assume good intentions — We’re transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child’s first year.

If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. We’re building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring “Chainguardians” with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard’s Global Candidate Privacy Notice.

Apply now >