David Larsen
Baltimore, MD · LinkedIn · davidlarsen.me
Customer Success Leader · Technical CS & Systems Builder
Customer Success leader with deep technical roots and a track record of building post-sales systems from zero at early-stage SaaS companies. Proven at designing onboarding, renewal risk, and account operating models; implementing CS platforms at scale; and partnering with executive leadership to protect and grow revenue. Combines hands-on technical execution (APIs, security tooling, production code) with strategic ownership of CS processes supporting multi-million-dollar ARR.
Experience
Technical Success Manager (CS Systems & Process Leadership)
Sep 2025 – PresentSocket · Remote
- •Act as a CS systems and process leader at an early-stage B2B SaaS company, designing and operationalizing foundational post-sales workflows while managing a seven-figure ARR enterprise portfolio.
- •Rebuilt the end-to-end customer onboarding operating model from scratch, introducing standardized projects and optional customer-facing artifacts to improve consistency, accountability, and time-to-value across all customers.
- •Evaluated, selected, and independently implemented a Customer Success platform company-wide, modeling onboarding, renewal risk, and advocacy workflows and migrating historical data from CRM; platform now supports full company ARR.
- •Designed and operationalized a quarterly renewal risk governance process, replacing ad-hoc risk notes with structured risk fields and narratives, increasing executive visibility and contributing to proactive intervention on high-risk renewals.
- •Surfaced renewal risk on a six-figure enterprise account, contributing to executive escalation and successful retention.
- •Authored and led a data-backed proposal to reorganize the majority of company ARR into a post-sales pod model, aligning TSMs to top 20 strategic accounts and enabling scaled CSM coverage for commercial customers; approved by Head of Customer Success and Head of Customer Engineering.
- •Led rollout and change management for account reassignment, including direct alignment with CSMs and AEs and creation of standardized account transition templates.
- •Built internal productivity tooling integrating CS platform, team chat, and internal data sources to support leadership workflows, including a one-on-one preparation tool used by the Head of CS.
- •Contributed production code to customer-facing products, including enhancements to Socket Basics enabling automatic discovery of Dockerfiles in GitHub repositories, reducing configuration friction and improving adoption.
- •Participated in hiring and interview loops for Technical Success Managers and a Support Manager role, conducting 12+ interviews.
- •Won both Highest Output and Most Valuable Project awards at the Q4 Customer Engineering Hackathon.
Manager, Customer Support & Success Operations
Nov 2023 – Jul 2025Sentry · Remote
- •Directed global support and success operations for enterprise accounts; launched 24/7 on-call processes improving critical response times by ~50%.
- •Implemented AI-driven knowledge systems and operational workflows, reducing resolution times by ~20% and increasing enterprise customer self-service.
- •Established incident SLOs and executive-ready RCA summaries, strengthening trust and communication with strategic accounts.
- •Partnered with Customer Success leadership on renewal health, escalation strategy, and expansion planning across high-ARR customers.
Senior Manager, Customer Support
Jul 2021 – Oct 2023Synapse · Remote
- •Built KPI and SLA frameworks that reduced backlog by ~45% and improved customer satisfaction.
- •Led technical escalations across APIs, authentication, and platform reliability.
- •Partnered with CS and Sales to reduce churn risk and support expansion motions in high-ARR accounts.
Earlier Career (2016–2021)
Senior Technical Support Engineer at Contrast Security and Tenable; built deep expertise in enterprise security tooling, customer escalations, and cross-functional troubleshooting. Recognized for customer impact and technical leadership.
Skills & Tooling
Customer success leadership
Post-sales org design, onboarding operating models, renewal risk governance, executive QBRs, account segmentation, expansion strategy, churn intervention
CS systems & operations (admin / builder)
CS platform implementation (Vitally, Gainsight), CRM administration (Salesforce, HubSpot), ticketing systems (Zendesk), conversation intelligence (Gong), health score modeling, workflow automation, data migration
Technical depth (developer-adjacent)
REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, SQL, GitHub, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, production code contributions, developer and security tooling
Cross-functional leadership
Sales-to-CS handoffs, product feedback loops, support escalation frameworks, executive stakeholder alignment, hiring and interviewing
Collaboration & delivery
Slack, Notion, Jira, Linear, async documentation, change management, process rollouts
Signature strengths
Building CS infrastructure from zero, translating ambiguity into operating systems, bridging technical and business stakeholders
Education
B.S. Computer Networks & Cybersecurity
University of Maryland Global Campus