Customer Success Lead

Company Description:

Raftelis helps local governments and utilities thrive by providing management consulting expertise to help transform local governments and utilities. We’ve provided professional consulting services to more than 700 organizations in the last year alone. We work in all areas of management consulting including finance, assessment, communications, technology, executive recruitment, and strategic planning.

We’re proud to share that Raftelis has been certified as a Great Place to Work®! As one of our employees said, “at Raftelis, we maintain a great balance between hard work and allowing staff to focus on their lives outside of work. We also have a strong culture where people genuinely care about each other, and leadership is committed to doing what's best for both our employees and the firm”.

Job Summary:

Raftelis created Rafio, an AI agent built to make the people who serve utilities and local governments more capable, delivering intelligence they can trust and stand behind. The Customer Success Lead owns the post-sale relationship: developing the agreement for new clients once demo and interest have been established, then owning that relationship from kickoff through confident, independent daily use and beyond. This is a hands-on, technical customer success role. The single biggest driver of sustained usage is integration: connecting Rafio to the systems and data a customer already utilizes. You will be expected to scope, build, and troubleshoot those integrations yourself, working alongside other team members. You will also serve as the liaison between the client and the platform team, quarterbacking requests and triaging work to the right people when a need falls outside your direct support. You will report directly to the Chief Technology Officer, own the function solo at the start, and build a team as the customer base grows.

Success in this role is measured by usage that grows, customers who trust the output enough to lean on it, and a retention-and-expansion trajectory that becomes a revenue engine for the company.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Develop the client agreement once demo and interest have been established, converting engaged prospects into signed customers.
• Own onboarding end to end: take a newly signed customer from kickoff to confident, independent daily use.
• Serve as the primary liaison between the client and the platform team: quarterback requests, triage issues, and direct work to the right team members when a need falls outside your direct support.
• Deploy the platform inside the customer's real, often messy environment, rather than waiting for a clean hand-off.
• Scope, build, and troubleshoot integrations that connect Rafio to the customer's existing systems and data, since integrations are the critical driver of usage-based growth.
• Carry a net revenue retention and expansion target: drive growing usage across each account, identify expansion opportunities, and act on them.
• Earn and protect customer trust with a risk-averse, accountable buyer, ensuring the output is correct and defensible because trust is the foundation of the relationship.
• Build the repeatable systems a solo function needs to scale: self-service resources, documentation, onboarding playbooks, training, and tooling.
• Run customer enablement and education so users become proficient and self-sufficient, not dependent on support.
• Close the loop with product: translate what you see in real deployments into clear, prioritized feedback for the engineering team.
• Build and lead the customer success team as the customer base grows.
• Other duties assigned

Requirements:

• Hands-on technical ability. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you do need to build. You can scope and wire an integration, work through an API, read documentation, and troubleshoot why a connection is not behaving, without waiting for someone else to do the technical part. On a small team, the person who owns success also helps on the platform.
• Change management understanding. You have stood up software inside someone else's environment before, where the data was messy and the process undefined, and you made it work. You are drawn to getting a customer genuinely live and using the product, not to managing a relationship from a distance.
• The ability to earn trust with a careful buyer. You have worked with risk-averse, accountable customers, in government, education, healthcare, finance, or another high-trust, regulated setting, and you understand that with this buyer, correctness and credibility come before everything else.
• An owner's mindset about retention and growth. You think in terms of durable, growing usage and expansion, not just keeping accounts from leaving. You have owned a number, a book of business, or a unit's outcomes before, and you are energized by being accountable for whether usage and revenue grow.
• A process and scaling mentality. Before you scale yourself with headcount, you scale yourself with systems: documentation, self-service, repeatable playbooks, and better tooling. You have built the operational backbone that lets a small function serve a growing customer base.
• A product sensibility. You notice where a new user gets lost and you care about the first-run experience. You can turn what you observe in real deployments into clear, useful feedback that makes the product better.
• A teacher's patience. You can take a non-technical user from confused to confident, and you would rather build a customer who is self-sufficient than one who depends on you. Prior experience teaching, training, or building enablement is a strong plus.
• Alignment with our mission. We serve organizations that exist to serve their communities. You share the conviction that better tools in the hands of those operators improve the everyday lives of the people they serve.

We are open to candidates from a wide range of industries and backgrounds. Prior work with software, technical customer success, or solutions/deployment engineering is ideal, and public-sector experience is a welcome bonus. What matters most is how you think: technically capable, trustworthy with a careful buyer, and genuinely accountable for whether customers succeed and grow.

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they can perform every job description task. We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job, and that candidate may come from a less traditional background. We will consider any equivalent combination of knowledge, skills, education, and experience to meet minimum qualifications. If you are interested in applying, we encourage you to think broadly about your background and skill set for the role.

Rewards:

Working for a values-based organization focused on growth with an exceptional reputation in its industry, employees receive competitive compensation and excellent benefits that include:

• 100% Company paid medical (50% paid dependent medical) and dental benefits
• PPO medical plan buy-up option
• Health Savings Account
• Medical and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Vision Insurance
• Company paid Life and Disability Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Discretionary paid time off program
• Education Reimbursement Program
• 401(k) with company contributions
• Long-Term care benefits
• Pet insurance

Base compensation is competitive and depends on experience and location; variable compensation is tied directly to net revenue retention and usage expansion, so growth in the business is growth in your pay. Salary $100,000–$150,000 depending on experience. This position is bonus eligible.

This is a remote-friendly role. Raftelis has more than a dozen offices across the US where you can sit if you are nearby.

Additional Information:

To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States, and should not require, now or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status. Raftelis uses E-VERIFY. Raftelis is committed to providing equal employment opportunities and our sincere belief in the dignity of each employee, it is our policy to prohibit discrimination or harassment based on race, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, domestic partnership status, familial status, parental status, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, or related condition, including but not limited to lactation, age, disability, genetic information, past, current, or prospective service in the uniformed services, volunteer rescue squad worker status or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.

Raftelis is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment. To request a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, contact Allison Harllee, HR Manager, at 704-269-2536.

To learn more about Raftelis and apply, please visit www.raftelis.com.