Technical Customer Success Manager, API

Location: San Francisco Workplace: Hybrid Perplexity's API Platform brings our work in AI, search, and agent orchestration to developers. Our customers range from AI-native startups to some of the world's largest technology companies. Working with them, alongside our own developments in building Perplexity’s core application gives our team direct exposure to how search, models, and tools are used to build and scale AI-native products and applications. ABOUT THIS ROLE We are looking for a technically fluent Customer Success Manager to help our API customers succeed and shape how we support them as the business grows. You will own a portfolio of customers, understand what they are building, and help them move from evaluation to production and broader adoption. Alongside your accounts, you will lead projects such as product and endpoint migrations, customer enablement, and communications for product updates and incidents. You will work directly with customers developing AI products and with the engineers building the APIs they depend on. As an early member of the team, you will help shape our customer success programs and bring what you learn from customers into product decisions. RESPONSIBILITIES - Own customer relationships across onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion, building trust with developers, technical leaders, and business stakeholders. - Understand each customer's use case, integration, and success criteria. Help them evaluate the APIs, resolve adoption barriers, and establish a path to production. - Use account and product usage data to identify declining adoption, technical risks, and growth opportunities, then work with customers on specific next steps. - Investigate technical questions using API documentation, sample requests, and usage data. Coordinate with Engineering and Support on deeper issues and keep customers informed through resolution. - Lead customer-facing programs such as endpoint migrations, product rollouts, and enablement. Define milestones, coordinate internal owners, and track customer readiness and completion. - Manage customer communications for product changes, deprecations, and outages, partnering with technical teams to provide accurate updates and clear guidance. - Build and improve the API customer success playbook, including onboarding, account reviews, customer health signals, escalation paths, and sales-to-CS handoffs. - Partner with Sales and account owners on renewals and expansion, using adoption, consumption, and business outcomes to demonstrate value and surface risks early. - Bring customer feedback into product planning and work with Developer Relations and Support on documentation and enablement that address recurring needs. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 4+ years of experience in customer success, technical account management, solutions engineering, or a related customer-facing role at a technology company. - Technical fluency: comfortable reading API documentation, making API requests, interpreting responses and errors, and discussing integration questions with developers. - A track record of driving adoption, retention, or growth across a portfolio of customers, with clear ownership of follow-through. - Experience creating or improving a customer program, playbook, or cross-functional process, not only operating an established one. - Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical issues clearly and communicate carefully when facts are still developing. - Sound judgment in balancing account needs with strategic projects, setting priorities, and moving work forward without a detailed brief. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with APIs, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, or usage-based products. - Familiarity with AI applications, search, retrieval, or agents, including how customers evaluate quality, latency, and cost. - Working knowledge of Python or SQL for reproducing issues, analyzing usage, or automating recurring work.