Head of Customer Engineering

Job description

ABOUT SPAN Span exists to help engineering organizations turn AI adoption into real effectiveness. As AI tools reshape how software gets built, the companies that continuously improve how their teams use AI in their day-to-day will pull ahead. We're the AI-native developer intelligence platform built for that moment. We're looking for people who want to shape how the next generation of high-performing engineering orgs operate. We're a Series A company with a small, focused team that moves fast and ships things that matter. We’re proud to be helping forward-thinking orgs like Ramp, Carvana, Intercom, and OpenTable. We're honored to be backed by dozens of founders, CTOs, and CPOs we admire from Slack, Notion, Rippling, Fivetran, Coda, Adobe, and Square, as well as funds including Alt Capital, BoxGroup, Bling, Craft, and SV Angel. We’re looking for a Head of Customer Engineering to build and lead the technical customer function at Span. This role sits at the intersection of our customers, Product, Engineering, and GTM teams. You’ll work closely with engineering leaders to help them get meaningful value from Span—translating complex engineering data into actionable insights, solving technical challenges, and helping customers embed Span into how they operate. You’ll also define what Customer Engineering looks like at Span: building the playbooks, technical workflows, and team that allow us to deliver an exceptional customer experience as we scale. WHAT YOU’LL BE UP TO - Build trusted relationships with engineering leaders. Partner with VPs of Engineering, CTOs, engineering managers, and other technical stakeholders to understand their systems, challenges, and goals—and help them use Span to drive better engineering outcomes. - Own the technical customer journey. Lead technical discovery, implementation, onboarding, integrations, and ongoing technical enablement for our customers. - Turn data into action. Help customers navigate AI Effectiveness and Developer Intelligence, translating engineering data into insights and recommendations that leaders can actually use. - Solve complex customer problems. Dig into customer environments, data, integrations, and workflows to diagnose issues and develop thoughtful solutions—working directly with Product and Engineering when needed. - Connect engineering intelligence to business outcomes. Lead strategic conversations that help customers understand what their engineering data means, what actions they can take, and how those actions connect to broader organizational goals. - Be the technical voice of the customer. Develop a deep understanding of customer needs and bring structured feedback to Product and Engineering to help shape Span’s roadmap. - Partner across the customer lifecycle. Work closely with Sales and Customer Success on technical discovery, expansion opportunities, adoption challenges, and strategic accounts. - Build the Customer Engineering function. Define the operating model, playbooks, tooling, and processes for Customer Engineering—and hire and develop the team as Span grows. - Create leverage. Identify recurring customer problems and turn one-off solutions into scalable workflows, documentation, tooling, and product improvements. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Significant experience in a technical, customer-facing role such as Customer Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Technical Success, Forward Deployed Engineering, or a similar function. - Experience working directly with engineering organizations and senior technical leaders at mid-market or enterprise companies. - Strong technical fluency. You’re comfortable digging into APIs, integrations, data models, developer tooling, and modern software development workflows. - A consultative mindset. You’re energized by ambiguous customer problems and know how to get from “something isn’t working” to a clear diagnosis and solution. - The ability to move comfortably between technical depth and executive-level conversations—you can troubleshoot with an engineer and then explain the business implication to a VP or CTO. - Strong product instincts. You can distinguish between a customer-specific problem, a repeatable workflow, and something that should become part of the product. - Excellent communication skills, particularly when simplifying complex technical or data-heavy concepts. - A bias toward action and comfort operating in an early-stage environment where the playbook is still being written. - Experience building systems and processes that can scale beyond yourself. - A genuine interest in helping engineering organizations understand how they work and become more effective. BONUS POINTS IF YOU HAVE - Experience with engineering systems like GitHub, Jira, Linear, CI/CD platforms, or other developer tools. - Experience working with engineering analytics, developer productivity, AI coding tools, or Developer Intelligence products. - Experience working with APIs, data pipelines, SQL, or analytics platforms. - Experience building technical prototypes, scripts, integrations, or internal/customer-facing tools. - Been an early Customer Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or technical post-sales hire before. - Built or led a Customer Engineering or Solutions Engineering team in a high-growth SaaS company.