VP, Customer Success - Backblaze

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we are helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange (BLZE). Today, Backblaze generates over $120m in annual revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud - managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500,000+ customers in 175+ countries including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

While there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is tremendous upside in our future as we continue to head upmarket and scale our Enterprise business faster than the total market is growing.  To this end, we are seeking a VP, Customer Success! 

About the Role

The VP, Customer Success, will drive Backblaze’s customer success strategy to accelerate onboarding, adoption, and retention across our global customer base. Reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer, this role will develop and implement frameworks to optimize customer outcomes, ensure a value-driven engagement model, and scale customer success operations globally. This leader will play a pivotal role in maximizing Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) while fostering deep partnerships with internal stakeholders to ensure seamless alignment with sales, product, and technical teams.

What Youll Do:

Leadership Impact: Develop and execute strategies to improve the complete customer lifecycle, including customer onboarding, adoption, and satisfaction, optimizing Time-to-Value (TTV). Implement scalable customer success processes as appropriate based upon customer segmentation and strategic accounts. Review and adjust all customer success processes: onboarding, training, management, advocacy, upsell/cross-sell, and supporting renewals.  Lead customer success teams to improve NRR growth, retention, and overall account health metrics. Collaborate with technical sales, operations, support and engineering teams to ensure seamless implementation and value realization for clients.

Metrics: Lead measurable improvements in customer retention (GRR, NRR), TTV, and customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT). Optimize the processes to track Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs) and improve their volume and conversion rates. Monitor and improve customer onboarding completion rates and expansion success.

Strategic Impact: Build a customer lifecycle success roadmap emphasizing value-driven use cases and customer outcomes. Act as a champion for customers, ensuring their feedback informs product development, support, and service improvements. Build strong relationships with key accounts, fostering trust and ensuring long-term partnerships.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Align customer success efforts with sales, product management, marketing, and partnerships to ensure consistency and strategic alignment. Lead initiatives with technical sales teams to refine reference architectures and optimize proof-of-concept delivery for key accounts. Partner with HR to hire, train, and develop a world-class customer success team.

The Right Fit:

• Bachelor’s Degree with MS or MBA preferred
• 10+ years experience successfully leading a distributed Customer Success team, ideally in a B2B SaaS environment
• Proven track record of successfully managing a team within established budget parameters, and allocating resources effectively based on internal and external demands
• Ability to hire and mentor team members, including more technical and more strategic resources
• Deep understanding of SaaS businesses, with knowledge of SME and Enterprise markets with both subscription and consumption-based pricing and associated renewal models
• Excellent interpersonal skills and empathy for customers
• Significant experience building customer relationships at executive level and handling escalations
• An understanding of enterprise technology

Bonus Points:

• Domain knowledge of cloud infrastructure as a service
• Experience implementing Customer Success platform automation
• Proven track record of scaling Customer Success Manager productivity through process automation, artificial intelligence, etc. 

Backblaze Perks:

• We offer a competitive benefits package that includes:
• Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
• Competitive compensation and 401K
• RSU grants for full-time employees
• ESPP program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Maternity & paternity leave
• MacBook Pro to use for work plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
• Childcare bonus (human children only)
• Fertility treatment and support
• Learning & development program
• Commuter benefits
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base pay range for this position is $236,000 - $292,000.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries, but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.