Role Overview
The Customer Success Manager is a hands-on player-coach who owns the external link with our Ethena Pay users. You'll be the single accountable owner of the customer experience after signup. On day one you'll be in the queue answering tickets yourself, including the hard ones. For the 1st 6 months, expect roughly 70% doing the work and 30% building the operations of the function. You’ll be the 1st, so there is huge potential career growth baked in here. You’ll find your maximum ability and seniority level within the team, as the need for a larger support and payments ops org grows around you. Support is a key place a money product can truly stand out, and few competitors set a high bar We want users to tell other people how good our support is, and we want ticket volume to fall because the reasons for them are being removed. You'll sit directly inside the product team, working closely with Engineering, Finance, Compliance, and our GTM team.
Role Responsibilities
- Own the queue personally: handle most inbound tickets yourself early on, own Zendesk end to end (triage, tagging, macros, help centre). You’ll publish, and hold yourself to, the first response and resolution targets.
- Set a support quality bar users talk about: define what best-in-class looks like in writing, measure satisfaction and public sentiment properly, run response QA, and contact affected users before they contact us.
- Turn support into measured input for product and engineering: a standing weekly read by cluster and contact rate, every defect routed with impact and an owner, and clear escalation thresholds so emergencies move fast and routine volume never interrupts engineering.
- Automate the work: remove the causes of the largest clusters through product fixes, self-serve answers and automated status updates, use AI-assisted triage with a human check wherever money is involved, and track falling effort per user as an explicit goal.
- Be the named operational owner of our rails vendors (card issuer, on/off-ramp, KYC and wallet partners), with escalation paths, a vendor incident log and evidence for commercial reviews.
- Bring the manual money workflows under documented control: runbooks, four-eyes checks and audit trails for reconciliation, disputes and chargebacks, refunds, stuck withdrawals, fraud triage and KYC edge cases, working with parent Finance and Compliance.
- Build and lead the operations function: bring support across the ticket queue, Telegram and X into one operation, own user-facing incident comms, run an operations KPI dashboard, and grow a small front line and payments-ops team toward follow-the-sun and multilingual coverage.
Required Skills and Experience
- Previously run support or operations for a live consumer money product where mistakes moved, lost or delayed real customer funds, such as a neobank, payments company, card program, exchange or crypto money app.
- Owned operational KPIs and reported them regularly to executive and product audiences, with examples of numbers you moved and how you moved them.
- A track record of reducing the work, not just absorbing it: contact rates brought down or clusters engineered out, with before-and-after numbers.
- A support experience you built that users praised, backed by satisfaction or sentiment data.
- Handled money-movement exceptions end to end, such as disputes and chargebacks, refunds, failed or stuck withdrawals, reconciliation breaks, or KYC and sanctions escalations. You've also managed third-party vendors operationally, including getting a live production problem fixed.
- A player-coach who has done the work and built a small team or contracted capacity around it, including outsourced support and coverage across time zones or languages.
- Agent-native working: you use AI tools to cluster tickets, draft macros and help-centre content, and build reports, and you check the output for accuracy and tone.
