Founding Customer Success Lead

Vela | San Francisco | Full-time, in person

Reports to: Co-founder & CEO

Compensation: $110,000–$180,000 total comp

About Vela

Vela is a YC-backed AI recruiting coordinator for executive search firms. Our customers spend their days helping companies hire senior leaders. We handle the scheduling and coordination that gets in their way: finding times, following up, managing changes, and keeping interviews moving.

We're hiring our first Customer Success Manager to help those firms get live, build confidence in Vela, and make it part of how their teams work every day.

Today, our founders are very closely involved in onboarding and customer follow-through. You'll take ownership of that work and build the processes that let us serve more customers well. You'll work directly with our CEO, engineering team, and the people using Vela.

What you'll own

- Onboarding and implementation. Run kickoffs, understand each firm's workflow, coordinate setup and permissions with customer IT teams, train users, and follow through until they're scheduling successfully with Vela.

- Adoption. Stay close to partners, recruiters, researchers, and coordinators. Understand what's preventing usage, run useful check-ins, and help teams build habits that stick. We expect you to fly out to them and host in-person events very frequently.

- Customer issues from start to finish. Investigate problems, reproduce issues where possible, give engineering clear context, keep customers updated, and confirm that the issue is actually resolved. We expect excellence and incredibly fast response times. Our average customer response time is under 3 minutes.

- Usage and value reporting. Show customers how they're using Vela, where they're getting value, and what to improve. Turn usage data and customer feedback into clear recommendations.

- Account health. Spot disengagement and renewal risks early, build a plan to address them, and surface opportunities to expand usage. Partner with the CEO on commercial conversations.

- The CS playbook. Build onboarding checklists, customer guides, rollout plans, follow-up templates, and simple systems that make every next onboarding better.

Who we're looking for

• You have around 2–3+ years in customer success, implementation, account management, or a similarly hands-on customer-facing role. Strong experience in recruiting operations is also relevant.
• You've personally owned customer onboarding or adoption and can point to the results. You know how to move a rollout forward when people are busy and priorities change.
• You communicate clearly. You can lead a call with a firm owner, teach a new user, write a concise recap, and handle a difficult conversation calmly.
• You're organized and dependable. You track open issues, owners, and deadlines, and follow through without needing to be chased.
• You learn products deeply. You're comfortable investigating configurations, permissions, and workflows, and explaining what you find to both customers and engineers.
• You care about doing the work well. When something isn't working, you investigate, take responsibility for the next step, and keep going until it's resolved.
• You're comfortable building from scratch and spending much of your day directly with customers.
• Someone who is natuarally a happy person who wants to spread joy to our customers with a postitive attitude :)

Experience with executive search, recruiting software, B2B SaaS, or AI products is a strong plus. What matters most is your ability to learn quickly, earn trust, and deliver.

What success looks like in your first 90 days

• You're independently running routine onboardings and customer check-ins.
• Your accounts have clear rollout plans, visible adoption progress, and reliable follow-through on open issues.
• You've built the first version of our onboarding and account-health processes, and substantially reduced the founders' involvement in day-to-day customer delivery.

Why join

You'll be our first dedicated CS hire, with real ownership over how the function develops. You'll work directly with the founders, see your customer insights shape the product, and help search firms get meaningful time back.

We're a small team that cares deeply about what we're building and the people using it. We're looking for someone who feels the same way.

How we hire

An introductory conversation, a deeper discussion of work you've owned, and a practical exercise: a simulated customer kickoff, a short follow-up email, and an account-prioritization discussion. We will then move you to a 4-day paid in-person work trial before making a final decision.