Senior Customer Success Engineer at LanceDB

United States

$180k - $250k

<h2><strong>About LanceDB</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">LanceDB is a high-performance, open-source, cloud-native database built for AI-native and multimodal workflows. From vector search at multi-billion-scale to real-time retrieval, feature engineering, and analytics across large-scale datasets, LanceDB powers cutting-edge applications of machine learning and data infrastructure.<br />We’re building the next generation of intelligent, data-driven systems — and we’re looking for an experienced, customer-focused engineer who can help our enterprise users deploy, operate, and scale LanceDB successfully.</p><h2><strong>Your Role</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">As the <strong>Senior Customer Success Engineer</strong>, you will be a trusted advisor to our most strategic customers. You’ll combine deep technical expertise with outstanding communication and relationship-building skills to ensure customers achieve success in deploying and scaling LanceDB across production workloads.<br />You’ll guide customers from onboarding through adoption and expansion — while flexing seamlessly into <strong>pre-sales or technical support capacities</strong> as business needs require. You’ll serve as the connective tissue between our customers, product, and engineering teams, driving continuous improvement in both the customer experience and the product itself.<br />In this role, you will:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Partner closely with customers to design, deploy, and optimize LanceDB in production environments, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance for distributed, cloud-native workloads.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Lead technical onboarding and architecture reviews; provide best-practice guidance on system configuration, query optimization, and integration patterns in Rust and Python.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Proactively identify adoption barriers, troubleshoot complex distributed-system issues, and coordinate with product and engineering teams to drive timely resolutions.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Own customer success metrics: deployment time, usage growth, retention, and satisfaction. Build dashboards and track health across accounts.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Develop and deliver technical enablement: create sample code, automation tools, and documentation to accelerate customer outcomes.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Serve as the <strong>customer’s technical advocate</strong> internally — communicating feature requests, influencing roadmap priorities, and improving developer experience.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Collaborate cross-functionally with <strong>sales engineering</strong> (for technical evaluations, proofs-of-concept, and demos) and <strong>support engineering</strong> (for escalations and issue triage).</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Contribute to internal tooling, runbooks, and playbooks that will form the foundation of LanceDB’s future customer success organization.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">As the first senior hire in this function, shape processes, tooling, and team culture as we scale customer success and post-sales engineering.</p></li></ul><h2><strong>What We’re Looking For</strong><br /><strong>Must-have:</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>10+ years of professional experience</strong> in technical roles such as post-sales engineering, customer success, solutions architecture, or technical support, ideally within the data infrastructure or distributed systems space.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Proven track record supporting or deploying <strong>distributed database systems</strong> or large-scale <strong>cloud-native data platforms</strong> (e.g., high-availability, multi-region, and horizontally scalable environments).</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong proficiency in <strong>Rust</strong> and <strong>Python</strong> — able to read, debug, and write production-grade code in both languages.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Deep understanding of <strong>distributed systems concepts</strong>: sharding, replication, consensus, partitioning, failure recovery, and performance tuning.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience deploying and managing workloads on <strong>Kubernetes</strong> or other container orchestration frameworks, and familiarity with <strong>cloud environments</strong> (AWS, GCP, Azure).</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Exceptional communication and presentation skills: able to engage directly with customers’ engineering leaders, architects, and executives with credibility and empathy.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong problem-solving ability, coupled with a customer-first mindset and the ability to operate autonomously in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Willingness and ability to <strong>flex across functions</strong> — including pre-sales engineering, technical support, and post-sales enablement — as needed by the business.</p></li></ul><h2><strong>Nice-to-have:</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Previous experience as a founding or early member of a <strong>customer success</strong> or <strong>solutions engineering</strong> function at a high-growth startup.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience with <strong>vector search</strong>, <strong>feature stores</strong>, or <strong>AI-native data systems</strong>.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Contributions to open-source projects (especially in Rust or Python) or experience authoring developer-facing technical content.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Familiarity with modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and incident management best practices.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience designing or leading <strong>enterprise architecture workshops</strong> or <strong>technical proof-of-concepts</strong>.</p></li></ul><h2><strong>Why Join Us</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll join a world-class team of open-source builders (co-authors of pandas, and contributors to HDFS, Arrow, Iceberg, and HBase) working on cutting-edge AI infrastructure. You’ll collaborate on systems that power next-generation AI workloads while shaping how LanceDB operates and scales production environments.</p>