Principal Customer Success Manager (817)

Responsibilities

• Own a portfolio of strategic customer accounts as a book of business, with accountability for gross retention, net retention, renewal readiness, customer health, and long-term expansion across the installed base.
• Manage to ARR retention targets by building account plans, identifying renewal risk early, and driving proactive engagement strategies that increase product adoption, strengthen executive alignment, and reinforce business value before renewal cycles begin.
• Manage at-risk account playbooks for customers showing signs of churn, including low platform usage, unresolved support escalations, stalled onboarding, weak executive sponsorship, limited use-case adoption, compliance gaps, or competitive displacement risk.
• Work with customers and Protegrity architects to develop and refine solution plans for customer deployments, and assist in their implementation in an advisory capacity — spanning legacy ESA/DSG/protector environments, the new containerized microservices platform, and Protegrity AI Team Edition.
• Help customers develop a roadmap for comprehensive data security across the enterprise — covering on-prem, hybrid, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, BigQuery), and AI/ML workloads — and assist them in executing it.
• Become the client advocate and a trusted advisor for the client for all their data security needs, including the evolving conversation around AI governance, post-quantum readiness, and data-centric security strategy.
• Maintain knowledge of industry trends and technology developments relevant to customer and programmatic space — including AI security, agentic workflows, quantum-resilient cryptography, and evolving compliance regimes (PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, DORA).
• Identify and promote the need for additional Professional Services, particularly around appliance-to-containerized modernization projects and AI Team Edition rollouts.
• Work with Support, Services, and Training to ensure smooth onboarding of new customers, and to onboard existing customers onto new product editions and form factors.
• Review client requests with Technical Support or Product Management and take action as necessary; act as the structured voice of the customer back into Product and Engineering on the containerized platform rollout, AI Team Edition tech preview, and longer-term roadmap priorities.
• Schedule regular reviews with clients (QBRs and architecture reviews) to ensure best use of our products — going beyond status reporting to quantify risk reduction, audit savings, AI time-to-value, and data usability gains.
• Develop, prepare, and nurture customers for advocacy — references, case studies, analyst briefings, and speaking opportunities at Protegrity events.
• Lead customers through the transition from appliance-based Protegrity (ESA, DSG, classic protectors) to the new containerized, Kubernetes-native microservices architecture — co-authoring migration plans with Product, Solutions Engineering, and Professional Services, and de-risking re-platforming of production tokenization, encryption, and policy workloads with zero regression in compliance posture.
• Drive adoption of Protegrity AI Team Edition: help customers operationalize semantic-preserving encryption, data discovery and classification, anonymization, synthetic data, and guardrails inside notebooks, CI/CD, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows. Translate “tech preview” into “production-grade” through hands-on enablement and tight feedback loops with R&D.
• Mentor and uplevel peers in the Customer Success organization on technical depth, executive engagement, and complex modernization journeys — setting the bar for what “Principal” looks like on the team.

Required Qualifications

• Energetic, motivated, and self-driven to learn and master new technology — especially fast-moving areas such as containerized data platforms and AI security.
• 10+ years overall IT experience in Customer Success, data analytics, application development, or enterprise software, with at least 5 years as a technical consultant, technical project manager, solutions architect, or customer success/technical account manager. Consulting or solutions architecture experience with strong customer-facing skills is highly desirable.
• Hands-on experience with multiple RDBMS systems (DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL) and/or modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, Hadoop). Solid SQL programming and scripting skills.
• Strong understanding of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and working knowledge of DevOps and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines).
• Demonstrated track record of retaining and growing large enterprise customers, including ownership of multi-year, 7-figure renewals and expansion within strategic accounts.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; ability to lead conversations at a senior management level and translate deep technical concepts into business outcomes.
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking; ability to identify opportunities and transform them into action across cross-functional teams and all levels of management.
• Ability to manage multiple projects, track details, and travel up to 30–40% as needed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with data protection, privacy, or data security technologies — tokenization, format-preserving encryption, key management, DLP, or data governance (e.g., Protegrity, Thales, Voltage, Immuta, BigID, Privacera, Collibra).
• Experience supporting AI/ML or GenAI workloads in production — RAG, agentic workflows, LLM guardrails, or responsible-AI tooling — and familiarity with frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or hyperscaler offerings (Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI).
• Background in highly regulated verticals (Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, or Retail) with working knowledge of PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, or DORA.