Principal Customer Success Manager (817)

Job description

At Protegrity, we lead innovation by using AI and quantum-resistant cryptography to transform data protection across cloud-native, hybrid, on-premises, and open source environments. We leverage advanced cryptographic methods such as tokenization, format-preserving encryption, and quantum-resilient techniques to protect sensitive data. As a global leader in data security, our mission is to ensure that data isn’t just valuable but also usable, trusted, and safe. Protegrity offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of innovation and collaboration, with the ability to make a meaningful impact on the industry while working alongside some of the brightest minds. Together, we are redefining how the world safeguards data, enabling organizations to thrive in a GenAI era where data is the ultimate currency. If you're ready to shape the future of data security, Protegrity is the place for you. Protegrity is seeking a passionate and talented Principal Customer Success Manager to join our Customer Success team. Role Overview You are a senior, technically deep customer success leader who wants to operate where data protection, cloud-native platforms, and AI converge. Protegrity’s customers — some of the world’s largest banks, insurers, healthcare systems, and retailers — are at an inflection point: they are moving from our proven appliance-based Data Security Platform (Enterprise Security Administrator, Data Security Gateway, and the classic protector family covering databases, applications, files, and big data) to a new, containerized, microservices-based architecture. At the same time, they are adopting Protegrity AI Team Edition to secure GenAI pipelines, RAG, and agentic workflows with semantic-preserving encryption, guardrails, anonymization, discovery, and synthetic data. As a Principal Customer Success Manager, you will be the post-sales trusted advisor who guides these enterprises through that journey — protecting the value they already get from tokenization, format-preserving encryption, and field-level policy, while unlocking new AI use cases on the same policy fabric. You will champion customer-centric outcomes by working hand-in-hand with our architects, Support, Professional Services, Sales, and R&D to help customers build and execute roadmaps for comprehensive enterprise data security. If you want a role where your technical depth compounds, where you can lead conversations from a CISO’s office down to a platform engineer’s terminal, and where what you build today becomes the blueprint for how Fortune 500 customers protect data in the AI era — this is it. What You’ll Do Responsibilities may include but are not limited to the following, organized around the Customer Success charter of retention, adoption, and advocacy: Retention & Referenceability - 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. - Run structured 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. - Develop productive relationships with stakeholders from CISO, CDO, and Head of Data/AI down to platform engineering and security operations, and manage the needs, requests, and communications across that spectrum. - 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). - Be a single point-of-contact for process, interlocks, communications, and technical issues for customers. - 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. Modernization & AI Adoption - 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. What You’ll Need - 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). Strong SQL programming and scripting skills. - Solid working experience with Linux/Unix-based operating systems (RHEL, SUSE, Solaris, AIX) and Windows; comfortable in CLI environments. - Solid 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. Nice to have - 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. Education - Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent education / experience required. Should you accept this position, you must consent to and pass a Background Investigation, which includes (subject to country law), extended education, and additional criminal and civil checks. We offer a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits with generous vacation and holiday time off. All employees are also provided access to ongoing learning & development. Ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace is our priority. We are committed to an environment of acceptance where you are free to bring your full self to work. All qualified applicants and current employees will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability or veteran status. Please reference Section 12: Supplemental Notice for Job Applicants in our Privacy Policy https://www.protegrity.com/privacy-policy to inform you of the categories of personal information that we collect from individuals who inquire about and/or apply to work for Protegrity USA, Inc., or its parent company, subsidiaries or affiliates, and the purposes for which we use such personal information.