Principal, Customer Success

What you'll do

• Establish and lead the Aircraft Division Customer Success function supporting V-BAT and X-BAT customers across U.S. government, allied, defense, and strategic commercial accounts.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Customer Success Managers responsible for customer adoption, readiness, mission value, and long-term account success.
• Build and operate the Customer Success operating model, including account segmentation, customer health scoring, success plans, engagement cadence, executive business reviews, and lifecycle governance.
• Ensure priority customers have documented success plans tied to mission outcomes, readiness objectives, adoption milestones, sustainment needs, and executive stakeholder alignment.
• Establish clear ownership and operating rhythms across Customer Success, Deployment Operations, Flight Operations, Training, Sustainment, Program Management, Sales, Product, Engineering, Quality, and Mission Operations.
• Lead the Aircraft Division Critical Accounts Program for escalated, at-risk, high-priority, or strategically sensitive customers.
• Define and manage CAP entry criteria, severity levels, account health triggers, escalation paths, exit criteria, and executive reporting standards.
• Lead cross-functional critical account reviews with clear owners, decision logs, recovery plans, customer communications, root-cause analysis, and measurable closure criteria.
• Provide senior leadership with concise, action-oriented visibility into account risk, customer sentiment, mission impact, commercial exposure, and recovery status.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations, Quality, Supply Chain, Training, Sustainment, and Business Development to drive permanent corrective actions and prevent recurring customer issues.
• Serve as a senior customer advocate for V-BAT and X-BAT customers, ensuring Shield AI understands customer mission needs, operating constraints, adoption barriers, readiness expectations, and growth opportunities.
• Translate customer feedback into clear product, support, training, documentation, sustainment, and operational requirements.
• Build scalable processes for onboarding, adoption, training coordination, operational readiness, sustainment handoffs, and recurring mission value reviews.
• Support strategic customer engagements, demonstrations, exercises, operational deployments, and executive briefings as needed.
• Own customer health dashboards, risk registers, executive reporting, account plans, success plan templates, CAP dashboards, and operating metrics.
• Define and track indicators such as mission readiness, adoption, training progress, fleet availability, support responsiveness, issue aging, customer sentiment, renewal or expansion risk, and executive engagement health.
• Build a culture of urgency, ownership, operational excellence, professionalism, transparency, and customer advocacy across the Customer Success team.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in customer success, customer operations, account management, program management, field operations, professional services, aviation operations, defense technology, aerospace, or mission-critical enterprise technology.
• 10+ years of experience leading customer-facing teams or managing customer success, account management, support, field operations, or program teams.
• Demonstrated experience managing escalated, at-risk, executive-level, or mission-critical customer accounts.
• Experience operating structured escalation, customer health, critical account, executive governance, or customer recovery processes.
• Strong executive presence and ability to communicate clearly with senior military, government, enterprise, and internal executive stakeholders.
• Ability to lead cross-functional teams through ambiguity, urgency, conflict, and high operational stakes.
• Strong understanding of customer lifecycle management, adoption, sustainment, readiness, support, renewals, and expansion motions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including executive briefings, account plans, recovery plans, and leadership updates.
• Ability to travel up to 15% and work effectively with customers and teams in operational, field, and headquarters environments.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in defense, aerospace, autonomous systems, aviation, UAS, software-defined systems, military operations, or operational technology deployed in austere environments.
• Experience supporting Department of Defense, U.S. military services, allied defense customers, or government customers.
• Experience with VTOL UAS, aviation operations, ISR, mission systems, autonomy, deployed operations, aircraft sustainment, or mission-critical field operations.
• Prior military service or direct experience working with operational military units.
• Experience with structured Critical Accounts Programs, enterprise escalation frameworks, technical account management, customer success operations, or executive sponsor programs.
• Familiarity with Salesforce, Gainsight, Jira, Confluence, Tableau, Power BI, or similar customer success, support, and reporting systems.
• Active Secret or Top Secret clearance.