Senior CSM at Ethos - DoD SaaS Growth & Equity in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior individual contributor role with a mentorship dimension at a well-funded Series A defense-tech startup — a relatively rare and high-upside combination. With $40M+ raised and 150+ enterprise customers, Ethos is past early chaos but still in a high-growth phase where your contributions are visible and impactful.
Compensation is competitive: $125K–$150K base plus variable compensation and equity is at or slightly above market for Senior CSM roles in SaaS, particularly in the defense-tech vertical where security clearance and DoD experience command a premium. The equity upside at Series A could be meaningful if the company scales toward an exit.
Skills you'll build or deepen:
- Enterprise SaaS customer success at scale — renewals, expansions, executive business reviews
- DoD/government stakeholder management, a highly specialized and transferable skill set
- Change management and training program strategy in complex organizations
- Data-driven ROI storytelling for mission-critical environments
- Cross-functional leadership: Product, Engineering, Sales alignment
Green flags: Clear mentorship expectation signals a path toward a leadership role; startup culture with real customers means no vanity metrics. Yellow flags: Up to 30% travel is significant; defense contracts can have long and unpredictable renewal cycles; active security clearance is preferred but not required, so clearance holders have a distinct advantage.
Ideal for a Customer Success professional with a military or defense background looking to transition into the govtech/edtech SaaS space with strong upside.
About Ethos
Ethos is an AI-enabled human readiness platform that identifies and addresses knowledge gaps before they become operational failures. We can quantify skills and competencies critical to an organization, assess the proficiency of a team, and modernize training programs to enable active interventions for individual students, trainers or courses. As a well-funded Series A startup ($40M+ raised), we are trusted by over 150 enterprise customers across sectors including the defense, life sciences, manufacturing, supply chain, and professional sports.
About the Role
The Senior Mission Success Manager is critical to our mission of combining learning, performance, and outcomes in one unified platform to optimize human readiness. You'll own the full customer lifecycle for a portfolio that includes one of Ethos's largest and most strategic customers, from onboarding and implementation through executive business reviews, renewals, and expansion. You'll build trusted relationships with leaders across fleet commands, TYCOMs, and program offices, and serve as the voice of your customers inside Ethos.
The ideal candidate is self-driven, curious, and determined, and can manage several customers at different stages of their rollouts with ease. You're passionate about discovering a use case's ROI and sharing those stories across teams to scale its impact. You'll also raise the bar for the team by mentoring Mission Success Managers and shaping the playbooks we use to deliver readiness outcomes.
The role is fully remote.
Preferred: Location near major Naval installations and an active or former security clearance.
Job Responsibilities
- Own post-sale success across your portfolio, serving as the primary point of contact and ensuring customers achieve measurable readiness outcomes through use-case discovery, implementation, training, and support.
- Build and maintain executive-level relationships with leaders across fleet commands, TYCOMs, and program offices, and speak credibly about how secure, compliant capabilities give service members back time and bandwidth.
- Maintain a deep understanding of the command hierarchy of the military branches and the needs, opportunities, and challenges specific to the DoD, using it to advance adoption and surface new, high-value use cases.
- Act as a trusted advisor to customer leadership, delivering best practices, guidance, and strategic recommendations that align with their readiness goals.
- Develop joint success plans and change management strategies with customers to drive adoption of high-value use cases across enterprise rollouts.
- Lead data-driven quarterly and executive business reviews for senior DoD stakeholders, demonstrating how our platform optimizes human performance and directly contributes to mission outcomes.
- Analyze customer engagement, platform usage, and readiness data to identify gaps, quantify ROI, and share success stories across teams to scale impact.
- Monitor account health, identify churn risk early, and lead the mitigation plans that eliminate it.
- Own the renewal strategy for your portfolio and partner with Sales to identify and close expansion opportunities based on readiness gaps, usage patterns, and success plan objectives.
- Partner with Sales and our content development services team to make Ethos a core part of each customer's training strategy.
- Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Customer Support to track product releases and paths to deployment across commercial and classified networks.
- Advocate for customers internally by leading cross-functional teams and projects to resolve readiness challenges and feed customer insight into the product roadmap.
- Mentor Mission Success Managers and help build the playbooks, processes, and best practices our team uses to scale.
- Prioritize and drive timely resolution of customer escalations, with the understanding that every interaction affects mission-critical readiness.
Qualifications
Basic Qualifications:
- Up to 30% travel
- 5+ years of experience in Customer Success, account management, or solutions engineering in a SaaS environment
- Proven track record owning enterprise SaaS implementations, renewals, and expansions for a portfolio of strategic accounts
- Experience working for or with the DoD, including navigating command hierarchy and multiple levels of stakeholders
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S. as a U.S. citizen
- Strong communication skills and technical aptitude, with a track record of creating and delivering presentations to senior DoD stakeholders
- Fresh ideas on user adoption and churn mitigation, backed by results
- Experience analyzing data, trends, and client information to identify product/service growth opportunities
- Experience with and/or proven passion for learning and educational software
- Incredibly organized, proactive, and impeccable attention to detail
- A self-starter who takes the initiative to get things done
- Strong navigation and operation of Microsoft Office suite/Google tools
Preferred Qualifications:
- BS/BA degree from a 4-year college or university
- Active or former security clearance
- Experience working with DevSecOps partners and deploying software in secure or classified DoD environments
- Experience mentoring or coaching Customer Success or Mission Success team members
Compensation & Benefits
Competitive base salary based on location and experience with significant equity upside.
- Base salary range $125,000–$150,000 + variable compensation. Salary and title will be determined based on total experience.
- Subsidized health insurance, 401(k), life insurance, and a cell phone stipend
Frequently Asked Questions
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