Founding Customer Success Manager

About the Role:

There’s a famous saying in the fire service - “firefighters hate two things: change, and the way things are.” While first responders can be resistant to change, we’ve also learned that many software companies have failed to provide stellar products, let alone service. That’s where we at Stationwise are building something different. We call our process “white glove onboarding” for a reason, and onboard data and rules, configure it for customers, train them on the tool, and support them once they’re up and running. This can include helping with succession planning, creating one-off demo videos, and helping them manage internal stakeholders and processes.

Our Customer Success Manager will take on (and improve) most of these functions, in tandem with an Implementation Lead who focuses on the data onboarding process. This role will also provide substantial experience upselling add-on products with the help of the sales team to close them. From our staffing / workforce management core, we’re starting to build a fire department platform. New product offerings will more than double our ACV by the end of next year, so this role will be at the forefront of helping us meet (and ideally exceed) our revenue targets.

Everyone at Stationwise is an individual contributor, and this role will be no different. You’ll get a chance to roll up your sleeves building out support and upsell processes from the ground up. We will more than triple our number of active users between now and then end of 2025, so you can imagine how much growth we’re expecting in 2026! Creating these processes will provide the foundation on which we can scale next year and beyond.

This role will require travel: 20-40% some months. We are still in the phase of doing the things that don’t scale while we establish processes that do, and in-person time will always be valued in our industry. That said, visiting customers in person is expensive, so we want to budget effectively for how and why we meet in-person vs. on Zoom. Building relationships and training users are easier in person, but we’ll have to manage some virtually, especially for more remote customers.

What We Offer:

• Competitive base salary: $80,000 - $110,000 annual base salary
• Competitive equity: Early stage startup equity in line with a first Customer Success hire, to ensure you can share in the success you help create
• Insurance coverage: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Balanced co-location with remote work: Culture matters to us, and we have a small team in Chicago. You’ll work in-person with them, including the Implementation Lead (usually 1-2 days per week). This is balanced by the flexibility of remote work most of the time.
• Career development: Feedback and growth are in our DNA—Marcus learned to give and receive frequent feedback at Bain and as an Arbuckle Leadership Coach at Stanford, and Murat managed performance reviews for most of his team at Lyft. This role in particular is a good match for any future founders or chief operators. This hire will:
• Set the Customer Success vision for the company.
• Work directly with the CEO and CTO daily.
• Make strategic decisions far sooner than most CS leaders early in their careers.
• Develop your Product Manager skillset by working on features customers will pay for.
• Travel the world while helping improve the lives of first responders.
• Opportunity to Travel: 20-40% recurring travel (1-2 weeks per month, sometimes more) is expected to visit fire departments around the United States. For engineering off-sites, you may be able to travel to Turkey (Istanbul and Ankara) every year as well.

Responsibilities

• Lead and coordinate recurring meetings for all live customers, virtually and in-person, to ensure there is a consistent feedback loop between customers and the rest of Stationwise.
• Respond to customer tickets and create scalable processes to triage them using tools and automation (e.g., Intercom, Zapier) that deliver consistent, high-quality support, 24/7/365.
• Provide world-class project support to customers who struggle with the change management, including creating one-off trainings, how-to videos, and processes as-needed.
• Assist the Implementation Lead with customer onboarding, including managing the process, documenting and verifying rules, and verifying the accuracy of all data.
• Learn the intricacies of the core staffing platform so well that others can be trained, then do the same for the add-ons we are building.
• Maintain and build upon customer education program that includes live and asynchronous learning content (e.g., video tutorials, playbooks, training sessions).
• Establish success metrics and reporting to track adoption, renewal, and expansion performance.
• Drive customer activation and retention by designing onboarding and training frameworks that accelerate time-to-value and track the status for each customer.
• Co-develop large features and product expansions by working with customers to design ideal use cases after finding their needs, then relaying those designs to engineers.

Qualifications

Must-haves:

• 2-3 years in Customer Success, Account Management, Management Consulting, or related customer-facing roles.
• Proficient in Excel and/or Google Sheets, and able to clean, and transform, and analyze messy data.
• Incredibly organized and detail oriented.
• Fluent with modern CS and workflow tools (e.g., HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom, Zapier, Airtable).
• Infectious passion and excitement that can command a room.
• Excellent communicator who can influence across functions and present confidently to executives, admins, and end users.
• Experience leading organizational change management for customers or clients.
• Strategic thinker who prioritizes hands-on execution while keeping in mind the long-term vision.
• Hunger to win and eagerness to work at a VC-backed startup.
• Based in (or willing to relocate to) Chicago; we are not hiring remotely at this time.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in product design, product management, or translating customer insights into features
• Proven track record of driving customer retention and NRR growth at a SaaS company.
• Strong understanding of customer journey design, onboarding, and renewal forecasting.
• Experienced in customer education, training, enablement, or instructional design.
• Comfortable experimenting with AI copilots and workflow automation to scale efficiency.

About Us:

At Stationwise, our mission is to help customers fight fires, not software.

We build SaaS for fire departments, starting with a staffing tool. Fire Chiefs are under immense pressure to modernize, and Stationwise helps automate much of their workforce management, payroll, and budgeting. For the average career Fire Chief, labor costs are a $15-250 million a year problem—without Stationwise, the senior staff of a fire department wastes hundreds of hours a year just to input data, let alone tracking their budget. With Stationwise, Fire Chiefs can automate manual processes while making real decisions from their pay data, not just logging info for reports.

Our company was co-founded by Marcus Edwards, a firefighter's son, UIUC alum, and Stanford MBA, and Murat Aydos, formerly a senior staff engineer at Lyft at Udemy. Most employees are software engineers across the US and Turkey, and we’re now hiring to expand our US team in the Bay Area. As a venture-backed startup, we are all individual contributors who wear many hats—we promise the challenge will be great, and the chance to learn even greater.

We recently closed our largest customer yet, and we expect to triple the number of active users in Stationwise between now and the end of 2025. We expect even greater growth next year, so you’ll have the unique opportunity to build out the Customer Success function during this inflection point.

Our Values:

1. In service of those who serve: We empathize with our customers. Our team builds the best products for public servants because it’s what they deserve.
2. Multipliers: We achieve everything together. We accomplish big goals as a small team by making the most of everyone’s intelligence, capability, enthusiasm, and trust
3. Fearless feedback: We learn to grow. We are eager to seek out feedback, and team members provide it without hesitation.
4. Rapid response: We respond to change quickly. We aim to make the right decision fast, then to execute even faster.
5. Own the outcome: We hold each other accountable. Each team member is invested in (and responsible for) the work they produce.
6. Question and conquer: We question everything. Through respectful discourse, we test assumptions to make sure the best decision gets made.
7. Life, above all: We share the workload. We enjoy life outside of the office, and we take time to celebrate those moments together.

How to Apply:

Please complete the Google form in the Notion document linked to the "Apply" button.

Application Deadline:

Interested candidates are encouraged to apply ASAP. We accept applications on a rolling basis and will consider applicants on a first-come basis until the role is filled.

Equal Opportunity Employer: At Stationwise, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. We celebrate diversity and provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.