[Hiring] Customer Success Engineer @Element451

Role Description

As a Customer Success Engineer, you operate like a post-sale Solutions Engineer embedded in CS. You’ll bring technical depth to complex customer questions, triage and resolve escalations before they hit Engineering, and ensure clean, well-documented handoffs from Implementation.

What You'll Own

• Implementation-to-CS Handoff Quality
  • Partner with Implementation at the close of onboarding to review handoff artifacts — configuration summaries, integration overviews, known issues, open items, key workflows and flag anything that needs resolution before CS takes full ownership.
  • Participate in handoff calls when complexity warrants it, ensuring the receiving AM understands what was built, why, and what to watch for in the first 30–90 days.
  • Proactively identify configuration risks or adoption blockers that could become retention issues and escalate them to the right internal owners before they surface as customer problems.
• AM Technical Enablement
  • Serve as the primary technical resource for the AM team: the first stop for platform questions, configuration issues, workflow logic, reporting questions, and integration-related troubleshooting.
  • Join customer calls when technical depth materially changes the outcome — QBRs, escalations, complex workflow discussions, AI strategy sessions, platform design conversations.
  • Coach AM’s on platform fundamentals, AI agent logic, and integration concepts so they can independently handle more complexity over time.
  • Build and maintain internal enablement assets: troubleshooting guides, FAQs, how-it-works explainers, and repeatable patterns that raise the technical floor across the CS org.
• Technical Discovery & Solutioning
  • Lead technical discovery on post-go-live needs and translate vague pain into concrete requirements and a recommended approach.
  • Provide solution options with clear tradeoffs — configuration approach, workflow design, data implications, effort and risk — so AMs and customers can make decisions confidently.
  • Facilitate technical working sessions with Enrollment Ops and IT stakeholders to unblock decisions, clarify requirements, and align on next steps.
  • Produce lightweight solution artifacts — requirements summary, proposed approach, dependencies, risks, definition of done — that enable clean execution by the right internal team.
  • Own post-go-live technical solutioning across two tiers:
    • Tier 1 — configuration, troubleshooting, workflow guidance: own and deliver directly.
    • Tier 2 — new integrations, significant build, or complex projects: lead discovery, package the scope, and hand to PS for execution. For Tier 2, coordinate with Sales on timing before anything is communicated to the customer.
  • Act as the triage point for post-go-live needs flagged by AMs — assess whether the need is Tier 1 or Tier 2 and route accordingly.
• Escalation Triage & Resolution
  • Own technical escalations from CS: diagnose platform, configuration, and workflow issues, identify root cause, and drive resolution — often without Engineering involvement.
  • Coordinate with Support and Engineering on issues that require product-level investigation; translate technical findings into clear updates so AMs can keep customers informed without getting lost in the weeds.
  • Establish a clear escalation operating rhythm — intake, prioritization, expectations, communication norms — so AMs know what to expect and trust the process.
  • Track recurring escalation themes and surface them as structured signals to Product, Support, and Implementation — patterns are roadmap input, not just tickets.
• Platform Fluency & Best Practices
  • Stay current on releases and proactively brief the CS team on what changed, what matters, and how to use it with customers.
  • Maintain deep fluency across Element451: CRM configuration, student journey logic, AI agent behavior, communication workflows, application management, and reporting.
  • Develop and document best-practice patterns for common higher ed use cases — segmentation design, journey architecture, communication cadence, governance models — to support AM conversations and QBR recommendations.
• Cross-Functional Contribution
  • Act as a connector across CS, Implementation, Support, and Product — translating real customer friction into actionable internal feedback.
  • Help CS leadership identify systemic issues across the portfolio — configuration drift, adoption gaps, recurring confusion — and propose fixes that scale.
  • Contribute to a durable knowledge base: document what you learn, standardize what you solve, and reduce the cost of every future escalation.
• AM & CSE relationship
  • The AM owns the client. The CSE owns the technical layer behind the client. In practice, the CSE supports from behind — and steps into client conversations when technical depth is needed.
  • The long-term goal is for AMs to bring the CSE in for genuinely complex situations, not routine questions, because you’ve raised the technical capability of the whole team.

Qualifications

• 4–7 years in a technical, customer-facing role in B2B SaaS — Customer Success Engineer, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Consultant, or an implementation-adjacent CS role.
• Direct experience with a higher education CRM and the workflows it supports — Element451, Slate, Salesforce Education Cloud, Ellucian CRM Advance, TargetX, or similar strongly preferred.
• Strong technical discovery skills: you can move from vague pain to concrete requirements to a recommended approach without losing the room.
• Deep command of CRM configuration thinking: objects and fields, segmentation logic, workflow and journey design, and reporting implications.
• Enough integration and API literacy to diagnose symptoms, speak credibly with IT teams, and understand what’s happening in a broken data sync — you don’t need to build integrations, but you must understand them.
• Ability to lead technical working sessions with Enrollment Ops and IT, align stakeholders on next steps, and translate outcomes back to the AM team clearly.
• Excellent communicator who can make technical concepts accessible to non-technical audiences — AMs and institutional administrators alike — without losing precision.
• Coaching mindset: you get energy from making the people around you more capable, building reusable assets, and reducing dependency over time.
• High ownership and reliability across a shared portfolio — when a AM escalates something to you, they trust it will get handled.