Senior Manager, Onboarding (high-touch customers)

Job description

ABOUT PLEO Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’. The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior Manager, Onboarding to join our Customer Experience team at Pleo!. In this role, you'll lead the strategy, operating model, and team responsible for onboarding Pleo's largest, most complex, and strategically important customers. You'll ensure enterprise customers move from contract signature to successful implementation, adoption, and measurable value through a structured, relationship-driven onboarding experience. You'll lead a team responsible for complex customer program that may involve multiple business units, entities, countries, technical integrations, senior stakeholders and change-management requirements WHO YOU’LL BE WORKING WITH AND REPORTING TO You'll report to our Director, Customer Success and work closely with leaders and team across customer success and support, sales and account management, product, and others. You'll lead a team of 4 enterprise onboarding managers responsible for delivering high-touch onboarding programs to Pleo's largest customers. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING As a Senior Manager, Onboarding you will: Lead the team and the strategy: - Set the strategy for onboarding our biggest, most complex customers, and lead the team that delivers it. - Manage and grow a team of Enterprise Onboarding and Enablement Managers. Give them clear goals around customer outcomes, quality, and time-to-value. - Run the end-to-end onboarding model: from discovery and implementation planning through configuration, integrations, enablement, go-live, and handover to Customer Success. Build relationships that matter: - Build trust with senior stakeholders, CFOs, finance leaders, transformation leads, IT leaders, and executive sponsors. - Keep every onboarding conversation focused on business value, not just technical delivery. Connect what Pleo does to what the customer is actually trying to achieve. - Lead executive conversations on progress, value, risk, and readiness, and hold your own in technical conversations with Product, Engineering, Solutions, and Security, without losing the bigger picture. Keep programmes on track: - Set clear governance for every programme: scope, milestones, owners, decisions, dependencies, and risks. - Build a steady rhythm of steering calls and reviews for the programmes that matter most. - Spot risk early, stalled decisions, low engagement, technical blockers, changed stakeholders, and lead recovery plans when a programme needs one, with clear actions, owners, and timelines. Strengthen the handoffs: - Work with Sales before and during handover to confirm requirements, complexity, timelines, and what we've committed to, so nothing gets lost in translation. - Work with Product and Engineering to unblock integrations, technical issues, and customer-specific implementation risks. - Build a strong handover to Customer Success, so goals, relationships, risks, and open items carry over cleanly. Drive adoption, not just go-live: - Build enablement programmes that help admins, finance teams, managers, and employees actually use Pleo well. - Tailor how you enable different people, a finance admin needs something different from an employee submitting expenses. - Help customers manage the change: preparing users, building champions, and making new ways of working stick. Use data to keep improving: - Track onboarding health, timelines, capacity, and go-live confidence, and forecast what's coming. - Use what you learn to improve the model, spot patterns, and cut out unnecessary complexity. - Be the voice of the enterprise customer inside Pleo, make sure recurring blockers and product friction get seen by Product, Engineering, and leadership. - Keep raising the bar for how Pleo supports its most complex customers, from the first conversation to real value realised. WHAT YOU BRING You’ll thrive in this role if you have: - 8+ years of experience in customer onboarding, enterprise implementation, customer success, customer enablement or a related customer-facing function - 4+ years leading people, ideally in enterprise onboarding, implementation, solutions, or customer success teams - A track record of delivering onboarding or implementation programmes at enterprise tech companies - Experience with large, complex customers, multiple stakeholders, regions, entities, workflows or technical dependencies - A relationship-first leadership style, and the ability to earn trust with senior customer stakeholders quickly. - Real executive presence: you're comfortable presenting to CFOs, finance leaders, technology leaders, and executive sponsors. - Experience leading technical conversations with Product team covering integrations, security, data or configuration - Experience building enablement programmes for different audiences - Strong people-management and coaching skills, with a record of building high-performing, customer-facing teams. - Commercial awareness: you understand how onboarding quality affects adoption, retention, customer confidence, revenue, and account growth over time. - Strong cross-functional leadership, you can influence teams and leaders even without direct authority over them. - A data-driven, disciplined approach: you use metrics, forecasts, and customer signals to guide decisions. - Comfort with fast-paced growth WHY IS THIS ROLE A GOOD FIT FOR YOU This role is a good fit for you if: - You think in outcomes, not tickets. You want onboarding to prove value to the customer, not just tick off a technical implementation - You like leading a team through complexity, juggling multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and the occasional at-risk programme doesn't rattle you, it's where you do your best work. - You'd rather be in the room with a CFO than behind a project plan, you enjoy building trust with senior stakeholders and leading high-stakes conversations, not just coordinating tasks. This role is not a good fit for you if: - You prefer a narrower, more predictable scope, this role spans strategy, people leadership, executive relationships, and hands-on risk management, all at once. - You'd rather stick to the technical side of implementation, this role needs you to hold the business case as tightly as the technical detail, and move fluidly between the two. - You're looking for a purely individual-contributor role, leading and developing a team is core to this job, not a side responsibility. HOW YOU’LL DEVELOP IN THIS ROLE In your first 6 months at Pleo, you’ll: - Build a mature and repeatable enterprise onboarding and enablement operating model. - Deliver measurable improvements in time-to-value, go-live success, adoption, and customer satisfaction. - Establish stronger relationships and governance across Pleo’s largest customer implementations. - Reduce implementation delays caused by unclear ownership, technical dependencies, or stakeholder misalignment. - Improve how customer value is defined, positioned, measured, and transferred into ongoing Customer Success plans. - Be recognised as a key leader in how Pleo launches, enables, and retains large enterprise customers. THE LOCATION Please note: We can hire on a hybrid set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations. SHOW ME THE BENEFITS! - Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!) - Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office - Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis - We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays - For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options - We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far - Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work THE INTERVIEW PROCESS We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows: 1. Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background. 2. Hiring Manager Interview: 45 mins interview to go deeper on your experience and how your profile can fit to the role 3. Pleo Challenge and Panel Interview: We will send you a take home test and invite you to present it during a 60 mins team interview. This is an opportunity to show us how you would handle the day to day of the role 4. Final Interview: A final interview with a Senior Leader Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what we’re looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success! Last time we hired a similar role, we received a vast number of applications but only a few were selected for an intro call. Some of the key reasons why previous candidates didn’t make it past the application screening stage include: - CV writing and content: we receive a lot of CVs, and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI—it’s a big focus for us internally too—but without human intervention, these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What we're really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you know from your previous experience. A top tip from us is to use the “Achieved X, as measured by Y, by doing Z” formula (credit: Laszlo Bock, ~2014) to give a really clear picture of what you’ve worked on. A final note: including links to your previous companies' websites is a huge help and allows us to truly understand your background! - Application care: every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes, hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates' efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully, they make a huge difference in our decision-making process. - Profile to role fit: highlight most important aspects of the role, points that might get misunderstood, any specific industry requirements etc. ABOUT YOUR APPLICATION - English first. Since it's our company language, please submit your application in English. You’ll be using it a lot if you join us. - A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly, we only accept applications through our system—our support team can’t pass on calls or emails. - Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply, even if you don't tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us. - Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format, email belonging@pleo.io. We’ll design a process that works for you. - Your data is safe. When you apply, we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data, read our Privacy Policy here https://www.pleo.io/en/legal. - Applying for multiple roles? Nothing is stopping you, and we assess every role independently. However, we do look for alignment, so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role. - Reapplying. If you’re applying for the same role again, please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.