Director of Customer Experience

Who We Look For

The people who thrive at Lightning AI are builders who move with urgency, communicate openly, take ownership, and continuously raise the bar for themselves and their teams.

We value leaders who create clarity in complex environments, stay close to customers and the work, and build systems that scale without introducing unnecessary processes.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Customer Experience to build and lead the organization responsible for helping Lightning AI customers realize meaningful value from our platform.

You will own the strategy, operating model, and execution of our customer experience function, leading a team of Technical Account Managers and Customer Experience Managers supporting customers across the AI lifecycle—from initial onboarding and workload migration through production adoption, optimization, and expansion.

This role sits at the intersection of customers, engineering, product, sales, and infrastructure. You will be accountable for ensuring customers can successfully build and operate AI workloads on Lightning AI while receiving clear, proactive, and technically credible guidance throughout the relationship.

The right leader will combine strong customer judgment with technical depth and operational rigor. You should be comfortable getting into the technical details enough so that you understand where customers are blocked, influencing product priorities, and advising executives on retention, risk, adoption, and account health.

This is a highly visible leadership role with the opportunity to define what world-class customer experience looks like for a developer-first AI platform and infrastructure company.

What You’ll Do

• Define and own Lightning AI’s customer experience strategy across onboarding, implementation, adoption, technical success, support coordination, retention, and expansion.
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing global team of Technical Account Managers and Support Engineers.
• Establish account-health frameworks that combine product usage, platform reliability, workload performance, customer sentiment, support activity, and commercial risk.
• Create clear escalation and incident-management processes that provide customers with fast response times, strong ownership, seamless internal coordination, and proactive communication.
• Define and track the metrics that matter, including time to value, activation, platform adoption, workload growth, retention, expansion, customer health, resolution time, and customer satisfaction.
• Turn customer conversations and usage patterns into actionable insights for product and engineering.
• Scale the function thoughtfully, balancing high-touch customer engagement with automation, self-service resources, and repeatable programs.

What You’ll Need

• 10+ years of experience across customer experience, customer success, technical account management, solutions architecture, professional services, or a related customer-facing function.
• Growth-stage, enterprise SaaS, developer platform, cloud infrastructure, or AI infrastructure environment preferred, but not required
• A proven track record of building or scaling customer experience organizations supporting technically complex products.
• Strong technical fluency and the ability to engage credibly with engineering leaders, ML engineers, AI researchers, infrastructure teams, and enterprise platform organizations.
• A record of improving customer adoption, retention, account health, and operational execution through clear systems and measurable goals.
• Strong judgment during high-pressure customer escalations, including the ability to create clarity, align internal teams, and communicate directly with senior stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You can move comfortably between a technical incident review, an executive customer conversation, an internal product discussion, and a team operating review.
• Strong cross-functional influence, particularly with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Sales, and Finance.
• A high bias for action and comfort operating in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment with limited process and significant ownership.
• The ability to think strategically while remaining close to customers, team execution, and operational details.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with PyTorch, distributed training, model serving, inference, Kubernetes, Slurm, GPU clusters, or modern AI development workflows.
• Experience supporting both product-led and enterprise sales motions.
• Experience building global or follow-the-sun customer coverage models.
• Experience developing AI-powered customer operations, automation, self-service tooling, or customer intelligence systems.

Location

This role is based in New York City, with an expectation of working from the office at least two days per week and participating in occasional team and company offsites.