Customer Success Manager

The first real owner of our customer relationships — from kickoff through expansion.

Location: Redwood City, CA (In-person, 5 days/week + travel to customers)

Experience: Operator background; procurement/CPG/food a strong plus, not required

Company: Waystation AI

Waystation is building the operating system for procurement in consumer packaged goods (CPG).

Today, ingredient and packaging sourcing still runs through inboxes, PDFs, and spreadsheets. It's slow, opaque, and costly. Waystation replaces that chaos with an AI-powered procurement platform that creates structure, visibility, and leverage — without forcing suppliers into portals.

The result: real ROI. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months, paying for their annual contract in the first 30 days.

Waystation is led by repeat founder Ryan Caldbeck (previously founded CircleUp) and backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP. We have paying customers, real usage, and a product that works.

You own the customer relationship and take it off the founder's plate. You're measured on one thing: getting customers to value and keeping them there.

You'll own a book of accounts end to end — run the room, own the deployment, drive each account to its time-to-value date, and spot expansion as usage climbs toward and past committed spend. No one will hold your hand. You'll have unusual access and unusual scope, and you'll be expected to use both.

You're in Redwood City five days a week, and you'll travel to customers when running the room means being in theirs — they're not in the Bay.

• Own the relationship. Hold a book of accounts and the relationship within each — you are the customer's person.
  

• Run onboarding and kickoffs. Set the eval bar with the customer and gather the inputs and context the product needs to deliver.
  

• Drive value in multi-stakeholder rooms. Manage skeptics included, and push each account to its time-to-value date.
  

• Spot and drive expansion. Surface latent procurement work as usage grows toward — and past — committed spend.
  

• Own the renewal. Forecast it like a pipeline, know every date, protect the base. You run the commercial conversation.
  

• Build leverage. Stand up light tooling and automations to scale yourself, and surface usage patterns to product so we build proactively, not reactively.
  

We'll back the right operator over the right résumé. We care about a defined edge, grit, and customer obsession — not polish.

You're a strong fit if you:

• Have one superpower. There's a thing you're genuinely better at than almost anyone, and you can name it and point to results that prove it. We want a sharp edge and the slope to outgrow the job — not evenly good at everything.
  

• Learn fast and love it. Drop you into a new product, customer, or domain and you're dangerous in weeks. You're energized by the ramp, not waiting to be taught.
  

• Own whole problems. You take messy things start to finish and close them without being asked. You'd rather tell us about a hard problem you owned and the outcome than describe a tidy framework.
  

• Build leverage. You reach for tools, automation, and agents to scale yourself instead of grinding manually. We live in Claude Code — you should want to, too.
  

• Are all in. This is a rocket ship you want to plant a flag on and ride through the messy middle — not a stepping stone. We're betting on you; we need you betting on us.
  

• Have grit. You've persevered at something hard for a long time, where the feedback loop on success ran much longer than your next review.
  

Bonus: exposure to procurement, CPG, or food.

You'll ramp on an MBO plan for your first 90 days, gearing toward a scorecard built on four measures:

• Time to first unit of work. How fast a new account produces a real unit of work that clears the customer's quality bar — you set that eval bar with them at kickoff.
  

• Velocity. You drive down time-to-value account over account against an explicit target.
  

• Units stacking / active usage. Customers complete more units of work, more often — daily and weekly active usage climbs.
  

• Clearing committed spend. You unlock so much latent procurement work that usage clears — and ideally outgrows — committed spend.
  

• We are reliable, credible, and authentic
  

• We are solution-oriented
  

• We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves
  

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity — real ownership, with upside tied to the outcomes you drive
  

• Hands-on work with a repeat founder & CEO — and the customers themselves; a front-row seat to how an AI-native company gets built
  

• A real product with real ROI — value you can measure, which makes every customer conversation more honest
  

• Full health, dental, and vision coverage
  

• Unlimited vacation — we care about outcomes, not hours
  

• An in-person team that values craft and ambition
  

Don't send a cover letter. Send two things:

• A hard problem you owned. One customer or project, taken start to finish, and the outcome — what was true before, what you did, what was true after.
  

• Something you automated. A workflow, a playbook turned into a system, an agent — anywhere you scaled yourself instead of doing the manual work.
  

Short is fine. We're reading for ownership and judgment, not polish.