Customer Success Manager - Cybersecurity Career Growth in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This role sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, SaaS customer success, and enterprise relationship management — a highly marketable combination as supply chain security becomes a regulatory and boardroom priority post-SBOM mandates and recent high-profile breaches.
Compensation: Up to $130K base + bonus is competitive for a CSM at a Series C-stage startup, roughly in line with the 75th percentile for technical CSMs in the US. If you come from a pure CS background without deep security domain knowledge, this is at the high end; for those with DevSecOps or AppSec backgrounds, it may leave room to negotiate.
Career development signals:
- Working with Fortune 500 logos (OpenAI, Snowflake, Anduril) provides strong resume credentials and enterprise relationship experience.
- Deep exposure to supply chain security, containers, and DevSecOps — skills that are acutely in demand and expected to grow as compliance requirements tighten.
- High autonomy and an entrepreneurial mandate means you'll build processes, not just follow them — excellent for those seeking leadership or startup founding paths.
Green flags: Sequoia/Kleiner-backed with strong customer logos, remote-first with real stipends, 10-year option exercise window (rare and valuable), 100% health coverage, and genuine startup-stage ownership opportunity.
Watch for: Early-stage startups can mean shifting priorities and high expectations. The emphasis on "high autonomy" and "entrepreneurial mindset" signals you'll need to be self-directed — not ideal for those who prefer structured environments.
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.
Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
The role, in a nutshell:
As a Customer Success Manager at Chainguard, you will be the post-sales primary point of contact for our Commercial customers. You will be responsible for taking lead on customer engagements across onboarding, implementation, and adoption. In this role, you will work closely with Solutions Architects, Technical Support, Product Management, Engineering and Sales to ensure the successful onboarding and support of your customers. You are their day-to-day contact, building relationships with customers and driving outcomes, adoption, and delivering time-to-value.
What you'll do:
- Success Planning & Value: Drive business success planning by partnering with customers, pre-sales, and post-sales teams to align on requirements, goals, and challenges. Provide thought leadership on change management for large, scaled rollouts. Support the full Business Value Realization cycle to ensure customers can demonstrate and prove value internally.
- Customer Advocacy: Act as the voice of the customer within the organization, advocating for customer needs and requirements to internal teams. This means being a team player and having strong collaboration skills — this role must align with many different internal teams, influence them to act toward customer needs.
- Issue Management: Collaborate with Technical Support and Customer Engineering teams to ensure timely resolution to customer issues.
- Product Expertise: Develop hands-on technical knowledge of Chainguard and stay up-to-date with industry trends, new features, and best practices so you can help customers optimize their use of Chainguard.
- Training & Education: Collaborate with customers and our Edu team to ensure customers are educated on product features, best practices, and security principles.
- Account Management: Develop relationships with multiple levels of customer stakeholders from technicians to CISOs. Work closely with sales teams to identify the best path to renew and expand customers while minimizing churn risks.
What we're looking for:
- 2+ years experience in customer-facing roles collaborating with both technical and business teams — Customer Success, Professional Services, Technical Account Management, or a combination of those plus Sales, Solutions Engineering, or Technical Support.
- Relevant domain knowledge of one or more of the following: Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security infrastructure, containers, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle.
- This is a strategic and proactive role; our expectation is that this person will take full ownership of their customer portfolio and act with a high level of autonomy. This includes making key decisions to drive effective customer outcomes, deciding when to include our executive team or C-suite in customer escalations, how to de-risk or de-escalate customer issues and conflict, and advocating to internal teams including sales, product, engineering, etc.
- An entrepreneurial mindset — you will often build entirely new processes or practices to ensure we best serve customers.
- Demonstrates a strong commitment to continuous personal and professional development, actively seeking opportunities to enhance skills, expand knowledge, and advance within their career and field.
- Driven, high emotional intelligence, and strong priority management skills.
Strongly Preferred:
- Previous early-stage startup experience
- Passion for technology & cybersecurity
- Relevant hands-on technical experience in one or more of the following domains: cloud computing environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), containers, Linux, Supply Chain Security, DevSecOps, AppSec, security infrastructure, regulatory compliance requirements, vulnerability management, software development lifecycle.
Compensation: Up to $130,000 base salary + bonus
If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. Chainguard is on a mission to build the best team. To achieve our goal, we are focused on hiring Chainguardians with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
About Us
We live and breathe our company values:
- We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
- We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
- We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
- We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well-informed decisions.
A few of the benefits we offer:
- Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
- 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
- ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need — to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
- 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice.
©2026 Chainguard. All Rights Reserved.
Frequently Asked Questions
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