Director of Customer Success

About Operant AI

Operant AI is the only complete agent defense platform — offering four of the most important products at the forefront of securing AI in the world today: Agent Protector, Endpoint Protector, AI Gatekeeper™, and MCP Gateway. Together, they form the most comprehensive runtime defense suite available for enterprises deploying AI at scale, protecting every layer from infrastructure to LLMs to agentic workflows.

Operant is the only vendor recognized across all five of Gartner's most critical AI security reports — a distinction that reflects both the breadth and depth of what we've built. Backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs including Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we are on a mission to make AI deployment fast, frictionless, and secure.

We are now hiring a Director of Customer Success to lead and grow our most important customer and partner relationships in the United States — someone who will operate at the highest levels of the enterprise market, drive expansion across our top accounts, and deepen our strategic partnerships with leading AI infrastructure companies.

The Role

This is a senior, high-ownership role at the intersection of customer success, technical partnership, and strategic sales. You will own the post-sale relationship for Operant's top US accounts and AI infrastructure partners — including companies like Nutanix, Cerebras, and LangChain — while also driving expansion revenue, renewals, and new business within the existing customer base.

You will be the day-to-day face of Operant AI for key enterprise accounts — supporting and extending the work of Operant's founders, including the CEO, CTO, and COO, who hold the most senior relationships. You are their trusted extension: the consistent, expert presence that customers and partners rely on to get maximum value from Operant's platform, and that brings credibility and momentum to every engagement.

This is not a purely technical role, nor is it purely commercial. The ideal candidate brings both — someone who can go deep on architecture with a security engineer in the morning and lead a strategic business review with a CISO or VP of Infrastructure in the afternoon. It is a consultative technical partnership at its core, and it demands the full range: technical depth, executive presence, commercial instinct, and relationship management excellence.

This is a high-visibility role at a fast-moving, industry-leading AI startup. You will be working at the absolute forefront of AI security alongside a lean, high-caliber team that moves fast and expects the same from everyone on it. The learning curve is steep by design — and for the right person, that's the point.

What You'll Do

Strategic Account & Partner Success

• Own the post-sale relationship for Operant's top US enterprise accounts and AI infrastructure partners, driving adoption, retention, expansion, and renewal
• Serve as the primary point of contact and trusted advisor for strategic accounts — connecting customer needs to Operant's platform capabilities and product roadmap
• Lead and execute regular business reviews (QBRs/EBRs) with senior stakeholders, tying Operant's runtime defense telemetry to measurable business outcomes and security posture improvements
• Develop and grow strategic partnerships with AI infrastructure partners including Nutanix, Cerebras, LangChain, and others — identifying joint go-to-market opportunities, co-selling motions, and integration use cases
• Proactively identify expansion opportunities within the existing customer base — new product modules, additional use cases, broader organizational rollouts — and drive them to close

Technical Customer Success Engineering

• Drive successful onboarding and time-to-value for new customers, ensuring clean deployment of Operant's runtime defense stack across their AI and cloud environments
• Serve as a senior technical resource for customers navigating complex AI security architecture decisions — advising on agent security, MCP deployments, LLM runtime protection, and cloud-native defense strategies
• Proactively identify and remediate adoption gaps, integration challenges, and coverage blind spots before they become escalations
• Build reusable success assets: deployment guides, integration runbooks, security architecture reference patterns, and onboarding playbooks that scale across the US customer base
• Champion customer and partner feedback internally, acting as the voice of the market to Product and Engineering

Sales & Relationship Management

• Drive net revenue retention and expansion ARR across the US customer portfolio
• Collaborate closely with Sales on account strategy, pipeline development within existing accounts, and co-selling with partners
• Build and maintain a deep network of senior relationships across the US enterprise security, AI infrastructure, and cloud ecosystems
• Represent Operant at US industry events, CISO forums, executive briefings, and AI security conferences

What You'll Bring

Required:

• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), agentic AI platforms, LLM orchestration, or AI agent security
• Knowledge of and hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks and vendors — such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar — and a clear understanding of how these systems introduce novel security risks at runtime
• 10+ years of experience across customer success, sales engineering, solutions architecture, or technical account management at a cybersecurity or AI infrastructure company, with at least 3–5 years in a senior or director-level role
• A demonstrated track record of owning and expanding direct, named enterprise relationships — you are the person customers and partners call
• Proven experience in both sales and engineering contexts in the AI or cybersecurity space — you are as comfortable closing an expansion deal as you are architecting a deployment
• Strong sales and relationship management experience: pipeline management, forecasting, negotiation, and renewal ownership
• Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Strong working knowledge of API security, runtime application protection, CNAPP, or cloud workload security
• Fluency in AI/ML deployment architectures — you understand how LLM applications, AI agents, and MCP-connected systems are built and where they are vulnerable
• Proven ability to engage and influence C-suite and senior technical stakeholders simultaneously
• Based in California (Bay Area strongly preferred); hybrid with willingness to travel for key accounts, partner engagements, and company events

Preferred:

• Prior experience in penetration testing or offensive security — understanding attack methodologies from the adversary's perspective is a major plus in helping customers understand and prioritize their AI threat surface
• Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or platform/infrastructure engineering — operational experience with production cloud systems at scale is a significant advantage
• Existing relationships within the AI infrastructure ecosystem — experience working with or alongside companies like Nutanix, Cerebras, LangChain, or equivalent
• Experience in a growth-stage or Series A/B startup environment where you've had to build process, playbooks, and a team as well as execute

Why Operant AI

• Work at the forefront of the industry — AI security is the defining enterprise challenge of this decade, and you'll be solving it alongside a fast-paced, industry-leading team at the cutting edge
• Direct founder access — you'll work closely with and be supported by Operant's CEO, CTO, and COO on the company's most strategic accounts and partnerships
• Lean team, outsized impact — this is not a large org with layers of process; it's a tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real
• Mission that matters — securing the AI revolution so enterprises can innovate without compromise
• Competitive senior compensation — base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits commensurate with a senior director role in the Bay Area technology market

Operant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diverse backgrounds and are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work.