Scaled Customer Success Manager, Startups

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the scalable success strategy for OpenRouter’s portfolio of startups and established customers.

• Collaborate across functions to enhance and refine the operating system for startup activation, retention, growth, and Enterprise conversion.

• Develop and improve workflows, dashboards, alerts, and playbooks that assist the team in identifying startups that require attention, the reasons behind it, and the subsequent actions to take.

• Transform manual customer success and program operations into repeatable systems.

• Manage the startup inbox, oversee daily program communications, and monitor portfolio health within the startup segment.

• Construct scaled intervention workflows for customers exhibiting risk signs.

• Establish activation pathways that enable startups to achieve their initial value swiftly and understand how to utilize OpenRouter effectively.

• Collaborate with Sales to identify startups that are prepared for Enterprise conversion, increased usage commitments, premium support, compliance, observability, throughput, or strategic partnerships.

• Work across GTM to broaden distribution, enhance onboarding and activation, and link the startup program to larger growth initiatives.

• Employ AI-native tools and automation to minimize manual tasks across onboarding, follow-ups, risk detection, expansion identification, reporting, and feedback collection.

• Define the criteria for what constitutes a “healthy” startup customer.

• Categorize the portfolio into cohorts.

• Establish a regular cadence for reviewing the health of the startup portfolio.

• Contribute to the evolution of OpenRouter’s startup program into a scalable growth engine.

• Enhance the experiences related to application, approval, onboarding, activation, communication, and follow-ups.

• Develop rubrics and workflows that identify high-potential AI-native startups and direct them towards the appropriate journey.

• Guarantee that approved startups receive value promptly and have clear pathways for scaling.

• Continuously refine program operations by streamlining processes and enhancing experiences for founders, partners, and internal teams alike.

• Convert interactions with startup customers, founders, and partners into structured product signals.

• Collect and synthesize feedback on onboarding friction, model availability, routing behavior, latency, reliability, pricing, documentation gaps, integration challenges, and developer experience.

• Identify patterns to share with Product and Engineering based on frequency, customer severity, growth potential, and revenue impact.

⛳️ Requirements

• You have experience managing a scaled customer portfolio, startup program operations, developer ecosystem, PLG customer base, or a technical customer segment.

• You are passionate about startups and have a deep understanding of the challenges faced by early-stage companies.

• You enjoy collaborating closely with founders, operators, and emerging teams as they explore product-market fit, growth, and scaling.

• You are comfortable engaging with technical founders and products aimed at developers.

• You have a solid understanding of API-first businesses and can discuss usage, latency, reliability, cost, integrations, and production adoption with authority.

• You know how to identify churn risks, activation blockers, expansion signals, and commercial opportunities in a usage-based business model.

• You are proficient in customer data and can leverage usage trends, support signals, product analytics, and revenue data to drive initiatives.

• You have experience creating workflows, dashboards, automations, lifecycle programs, internal tools, customer journeys, or playbooks that enhance customer outcomes at scale.

• You approach your work with a builder mindset and take initiative beyond your traditional job responsibilities.

• You thrive on creating structure from ambiguity and assisting new programs in scaling from zero to one.

• You are comfortable operating in dynamic environments where processes are still being developed.

• You do not rely on manual touchpoints; instead, you prioritize systems, repeatability, and leverage.

🏝️ Benefits

• High autonomy

• High leverage

• Direct impact on retention

• Growth

• Future of OpenRouter's customer ecosystem