Head of Customer Success & Partnerships
Company: Starlight
Job Function: Relationship Management
Background
1 in 3 Americans who qualify for government benefits never receive them – not because they don’t qualify. Because the system is fragmented, manual, and nearly impossible to navigate. Over $500B flows through outdated, unconnected infrastructure every year.
Starlight is building the core infrastructure layer that connects CDFIs, financial institutions, and fintechs directly to government benefits — helping underserved households access SNAP, LIHEAP, utility support, and more.
Summary
We’re looking for an exceptional operator to take full ownership of two of our most critical functions: Customer Success and Partnerships, as a full-time member of our leadership team.
We expect you to drive meaningful progress, build durable AI-powered systems, and leave things measurably better than you found them. This is a greenfield opportunity to define how we scale, as we scale from a seed to a series stage company.
Responsibilities
Pillar 1 — Customer Success & B2B Sales Enablement (60%)
We’re building toward a customer support model powered by automation, clear patterns, and ruthless prioritization.
We are a B2B2C company. You will be owning the B2B customer relationships, not B2C end user support.
WHAT YOU’LL OWN
- Manage and grow our existing customer base (currently <20, scaling)
- Own B2B sales enablement — arm customers with what they need to expand usage
- Drive adoption and usage depth across the book of business
- Identify patterns across customers: what’s slowing adoption? What’s driving expansion? Systematize it.
- Build automation and self-serve infrastructure that eliminates repetitive support touchpoints
- Act as the voice of the customer back to Product — close feedback loops, surface insights, drive roadmap influence
- Audit your own job, automate a meaningful chunk, then repeat
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- Comfort holding two things at once: deep individual customer relationships AND systematic, scalable thinking
- Experience scaling a customer base from 20 → 50 → 100+ customers in a B2B context
- Strong instinct for sales enablement: you know how to help customers help themselves
- Deeply AI-native: you use AI tools fluently and think instinctively about AI-powered automation
- Customer success background with a growth mindset — you see patterns, simplify, and scale
- Ability & desire to travel nationwide to customers for on-site activation
Pillar 2 — Complex Partnerships (40%)
WHAT YOU’LL OWN
- Lead and deepen relationships with fintech partners and other strategic integrations
- Build product-level implementation partnerships — the kind that make us turnkey for new customers
- Drive partner onboarding from ‘signed’ to ‘fully embedded’ with structured playbooks
- Identify and develop new partnership opportunities that expand distribution and product surface area
- Work cross-functionally with Product and Engineering to ensure partners can self-serve at scale
Requirements
- Experience with CDFIs, fintechs preferred
- Track record managing complex, multi-stakeholder partner relationships in fintech or SaaS
- Ability to think like a product manager
- Comfort operating at the intersection of business development, product, and technical implementation