Senior Customer Success Engineer

About LanceDB
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.
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.Your Role
As the Senior Customer Success Engineer, 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.
You'll guide customers from onboarding through adoption and expansion — while flexing seamlessly into pre-sales or technical support capacities 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.
In this role, you will:

• Partner closely with customers to design, deploy, and optimize LanceDB in production environments, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance for distributed, cloud-native workloads.

• Lead technical onboarding and architecture reviews; provide best-practice guidance on system configuration, query optimization, and integration patterns in Rust and Python.

• Proactively identify adoption barriers, troubleshoot complex distributed-system issues, and coordinate with product and engineering teams to drive timely resolutions.

• Own customer success metrics: deployment time, usage growth, retention, and satisfaction. Build dashboards and track health across accounts.

• Develop and deliver technical enablement: create sample code, automation tools, and documentation to accelerate customer outcomes.

• Serve as the customer's technical advocate internally — communicating feature requests, influencing roadmap priorities, and improving developer experience.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with sales engineering (for technical evaluations, proofs-of-concept, and demos) and support engineering (for escalations and issue triage).

• Contribute to internal tooling, runbooks, and playbooks that will form the foundation of LanceDB's future customer success organization.

• As the first senior hire in this function, shape processes, tooling, and team culture as we scale customer success and post-sales engineering.

What We're Looking For
Must-have:

• 10+ years of professional experience in technical roles such as post-sales engineering, customer success, solutions architecture, or technical support, ideally within the data infrastructure or distributed systems space.

• Proven track record supporting or deploying distributed database systems or large-scale cloud-native data platforms (e.g., high-availability, multi-region, and horizontally scalable environments).

• Strong proficiency in Rust and Python — able to read, debug, and write production-grade code in both languages.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts: sharding, replication, consensus, partitioning, failure recovery, and performance tuning.

• Experience deploying and managing workloads on Kubernetes or other container orchestration frameworks, and familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Exceptional communication and presentation skills: able to engage directly with customers' engineering leaders, architects, and executives with credibility and empathy.

• Strong problem-solving ability, coupled with a customer-first mindset and the ability to operate autonomously in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

• Willingness and ability to flex across functions — including pre-sales engineering, technical support, and post-sales enablement — as needed by the business.

Nice-to-have:

• Previous experience as a founding or early member of a customer success or solutions engineering function at a high-growth startup.

• Hands-on experience with vector search, feature stores, or AI-native data systems.

• Contributions to open-source projects (especially in Rust or Python) or experience authoring developer-facing technical content.

• Familiarity with modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and incident management best practices.

• Experience designing or leading enterprise architecture workshops or technical proof-of-concepts.

Why This Role Matters
As LanceDB's first senior post-sales engineering hire, you'll set the tone for how we partner with customers after they adopt our technology. You'll have broad impact — from helping the world's most sophisticated engineering teams scale AI-native workloads, to defining how customer success is done in a deeply technical, open-source product company.
Your expertise in distributed systems, cloud architecture, and customer collaboration will ensure that LanceDB deployments are world-class — performant, reliable, and loved by developers.What We Offer

• Opportunity to shape the customer success function from the ground up at a technically ambitious, rapidly growing startup.

• Competitive compensation, equity, and comprehensive benefits.

• Work with an exceptional engineering team that values craftsmanship, open source, and innovation.

• Remote-first culture, flexible hours, and strong emphasis on autonomy and ownership.

• Significant career growth potential — future leadership opportunities as the team expands (e.g., Head of Customer Success, Director of Solutions Engineering).

How to Apply
Please send your resume and a short cover letter describing your experience helping customers deploy or scale distributed data systems (especially those built in Rust or Python). Include any relevant open-source contributions, talks, or technical blog posts.
We look forward to hearing how you've combined deep technical expertise with customer empathy to make complex systems successful in production.LanceDB is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive, world-class team of people with varied backgrounds and viewpoints.