Manager, Customer Engineering

Why This Role Exists

The Manager of Customer Engineering leads the CE organization in their region and ensures customers experience a smooth, consistent and value-focused journey from onboarding to renewal. They manage a team of Customer Engineers and Scaled Customer Engineers responsible for activation, technical configuration, workflow guidance, adoption coaching, and proactive portfolio health management.

This leader brings strong implementation and project management expertise into the post-sales organization. They ensure onboarding and adoption motions follow structured frameworks, meet the regional quality bar, and align with global playbooks. They work closely with Enablement to apply these playbooks with discipline, and with the leader of CE and SE to refine them to match real customer needs.

Partners play a critical role in scaling onboarding capacity. Partnerships and Partner Enablement provide trained and vetted partners, and the CE Manager decides when and how to leverage them. They supervise partner execution, ensure alignment to CE standards and help the CE team treat partners as an extension of their capacity so internal CEs can focus on the most impactful work.

This is a hands-on leadership role. The Manager joins customer calls when needed, supports escalations, ensures AI activation across their portfolio and leads the CE team with technical confidence, operational discipline and customer empathy.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, Develop and Manage the Regional CE Team. This includes daily coaching, hiring, performance management and skills development for a team of approximately five to six Customer Engineers and Scaled Customer Engineers. The Manager ensures consistent delivery of onboarding, activation and adoption and builds team confidence, structure and technical depth.
• Expand Capacity Through Delivery Partners. The Manager works with Partnerships and Partner Enablement to understand which vetted partners can support onboarding. They decide when to involve partners, oversee partner output to ensure quality and help the CE team view partners as an extension of their bandwidth.
• Own Technical Execution Across Onboarding, Activation and Adoption. They guide the CE team in delivering onboarding using structured project management principles with clear timelines, accurate configuration and high-quality communication. They ensure smooth activation, early adoption and workflow success.
• Drive Customer Health and GRR Outcomes. The Manager is accountable for Healthscore performance and Gross Revenue Retention across CE-managed accounts. They help the team identify risks early, intervene before renewal cycles and join renewal conversations when advanced technical input is required.
• Champion AI Activation and Adoption. They ensure the team understands Aircall’s AI capabilities and supports customers in activating and embedding AI into their workflows. AI adoption becomes a natural part of CE delivery under their leadership.
• Lead Scaled Education and Webinar-Driven Enablement. They work closely with Scaled CEs to deliver high-quality webinar onboarding and customer education. They monitor attendance, conversion and impact to refine scaled education efforts.
• Apply Global Playbooks and Adapt Them Locally. They collaborate with Enablement and the leader of CE and SE to execute global onboarding and adoption playbooks with consistency and improve them based on local realities and customer feedback.
• Collaborate Across Sales, CS, Support, Product and FDE. The Manager aligns with Account Management Leaders on renewal readiness and customer prioritization. They oversee escalations with Support and Product, and collaborate with FDEs when advanced technical guidance is required.
• Join Customer Calls When Needed. They join onboarding, adoption, escalation or renewal conversations when their leadership presence or technical acumen will meaningfully support outcomes or strengthen customer confidence.
• Lead Regional Projects and Select POCs. They contribute to regional process improvements and may run targeted proof of concepts for new onboarding or adoption workflows.
• Run a Data-Driven CE Operation. They track onboarding throughput, activation quality, AI usage, partner delivery quality, escalations and health signals. They use data to coach the team, optimize processes and refine workload prioritization.

Competencies and Capabilities

• People Leadership and Talent Development. Ability to coach and elevate mid to senior technical contributors and build a high-performing CE culture.
• Project Management Excellence. Deep project leadership skills grounded in implementation experience including timeline management, customer communication, scoped onboarding plans and high standards of delivery.
• Operational Discipline and Playbook Execution. Comfort with enforcing repeatable workflows and documentation standards and skilled at applying and improving global playbooks.
• Partner-First Leadership. Understands how to expand capacity through delivery partners and oversees partner performance to ensure alignment with expectations.
• Technical Understanding and Curiosity. Comfortable discussing workflows, integrations, troubleshooting patterns and configuration logic and guiding CEs through technical problem solving.
• AI Fluency. Understands Aircall’s AI features and ensures the CE team drives activation and adoption consistently.
• Scaled Education Mindset. Informed understanding of webinar-led onboarding, customer education programs and scalable enablement flows.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration. Works confidently across AM Leaders, Support, Product, FDE and Enablement to support customers across their journey.
• Data-Driven Judgement. Uses data and KPIs to guide coaching and improve operational efficiency.
• Calm Under Pressure. Able to provide clarity and structure in escalations, complex onboarding issues and renewal risk scenarios.

Experience and Background

• 7+ years of experience in a customer-facing SaaS environment, ideally in onboarding, implementation, technical support or technical customer success as both IC and Leader.
• Demonstrated success leading full implementation or onboarding projects from kickoff to go-live with clear timelines, customer communication and structured delivery.
• Experience managing a technical team, including coaching, performance management and skills development across multiple seniority levels.
• Experience coordinating with delivery partners or external onboarding vendors, including oversight of partner quality and alignment to internal standards.
• Hands-on exposure to technical configuration, integrations, workflow setup or troubleshooting within SaaS products.
• Familiarity with customer health management and retention drivers and experience supporting teams on renewal readiness.
• Experience supporting adoption of advanced product features such as analytics, automation workflows or AI.
• Strong cross-functional experience working with Sales, AM Leadership, Support, Product and Enablement in a post-sales context.
• Data-driven mindset with experience using dashboards, health or usage signals to guide actions and improve customer outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills including ability to explain technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort balancing structured onboarding motions with scalable education formats such as webinar-led sessions.